


The Taste of Wine after Ambrosia

by Tawabids



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Always warn for Shaw, Character Death, Charles can charm anyone, F/M, Faux Ancient Greece, Gore, Infidelity, M/M, Suicidal Ideation, Warning for Shaw, dub and non-con, religious self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-23
Updated: 2012-10-01
Packaged: 2017-11-14 21:08:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/519524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shaw, the king of the Greek gods, sees the mortal Charles in the heat of battle and spirits away him to be his Ganymede. Erik, the ex-slave who was Charles' human lover, will not let him go so easily.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. in which Charles falls in love with a lowly artisan

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for [this prompt at X-Men First Kink](http://xmen-firstkink.livejournal.com/5215.html?thread=5287519): "Charles as Ganymede, spirited off to bear the cup at Shaw's table (amongst other services). Erik as Charles' very mortal sweetheart, embarking on an epic journey to save his love from the fearsome gods. Assorted X-men as demigods or other gods who help Erik along his quest."
> 
> No warnings for this chapter, but future chapters will contain some serious warnings for violence, gore and non-con. I will change the tags as these arise and try to warn in the notes as well.

"He's beautiful," the midwife cooed the day Charles was born. "Look at those eyes."

Once she'd recovered from the ordeal, Charles' mother took a look at her new son and saw what the midwife meant. Huge, dark eyes, a perfect face, not the tiniest blemish. They swaddled the baby tightly and invited all the neighbourhood women to come and see him, and they all agreed: absolutely beautiful. Even when he screwed up his face and screamed like he was being murdered, the women sighed and clasped their hands and said, "He's going to be so well-loved."

Beauty was, after all, paramount to brains in the list of virtues.

When Charles was twelve his father died at war. His mother remarried quickly to a young businessman name Marko. At the wedding, Charles sulked and tried to tell his mother that Marko was only marrying her for her money.

"I know that, sweetheart, but a woman needs a husband," his mother patted his head, with barely six weeks' growth as it had been shaved, like her own, for his father's funeral. She had donned a blonde wig made of slaves' hair for the wedding. "Marko will take good care of us. You'll see."

Charles remained unconvinced. Just before the ceremony started, he found his father's second-best sword (the first had been burned with his father's body on some distant shore) and challenged Marko to the death. Marko took up a sword from one of his slaves and defeated Charles easily, but wounded him only slightly on the thigh to teach him a lesson. His mother was furious at Charles, and made him stay in his room with a slave tending to his wound while the feast was being served. Most of the guests, however, thought it was the most exciting wedding they had ever been to and several of them smuggled him titbits of roast chestnuts, honeycakes and wine-soaked figs as the party wore on.

The wound healed well and the limp that remained was not even noticeable, except when Charles was particularly drunk. As he grew, so did the hoards of his admirers, a fact of which Charles was well aware. People liked him. He couldn't help that, could he? He even formed a tentative truce with his stepfather, who kept up his education in return for seeing him around the house as little as possible. Finding other places to be was easy when you were the most beautiful youth in the _polis_. For a few sunny years, life for him was an unsurpassed dream of parties and fast-moving friendships, of drinking in the oratory of every politician and philosopher he could come across, of learning how easy it was to get what you wanted when people fell in love with your face from across the street.

Charles’ mother made a valiant effort to give Marko sons to match Charles, but only one child survived its first few weeks. Marko named him Cain. Charles knew as he watched his stepfather sacrificing to Shaw, every night of Cain’s first seven days, that the fragile friendship he’d been cultivating with Marko would soon crumble. Now that Marko had an heir of his own, Charles could never be anything but a rival and a usurper. For the first time he became aware of how thin and quiet his mother had become, trying desperately to produce the children Marko wanted in the hopes that it would make him love her as her first husband had.

The next child was the one that finally killed his poor mother. It came very late, and the labour dragged for days, no matter how many herbs and prayers to Frost the midwife administered. Corralled in the women’s quarters where the birth could not spiritually contaminate the rest of the house, the dying woman’s screams echoed and faded to groans as Charles and Marko hovered outside. Charles had no opportunity to speak to his mother before she died, but the midwife imparted her last words to her son – “Don’t shave your head for my funeral, my love, stay handsome for me”.

It was the moonlit hours of the morning when she finally went. Charles sat in the courtyard until dawn, but could not watch Marko’s exaggerated lamentations or listen to his stepfather praise the Gods for giving him _such a good wife, however briefly_. As soon as he was told his mother was dead, he beckoned his mother’s maid and left the house.

He had nothing suitable to put on her pyre, so he took as many coins as he could scrounge at short notice and hoped it would do for a deposit. The maid suggested an artisan in the lower district whose work had always been much admired by his mother, and Charles went straight to the workshop to commission fine bangles and earrings for her to wear into the afterlife.

The jeweller, he discovered, was a young man only a few years out of his apprenticeship. He had a fairish complexion that was not local, blue eyes that he wore as if they were common as sandals, and a foreign tallness that meant he had to stoop to greet Charles in the doorway. He listened to Charles’ request without speaking, occasionally nodding and shifting his hands as if already working over the ornaments in his mind.

At last he said, “Come tomorrow, before the noon. Twenty drachma.”

“Oh,” Charles beamed at him. “Thank you. I didn’t really think it could be done in time for the cremation, it was a bit of a vain hope – you’ll make them yourself, will you? You don’t have a phalanx of slaves to help?”

“I make everything myself. I will work through the night.”

“Really? No, you mustn’t – I’m not paying you enough for that.”

“No, you’re not,” the jeweller shrugged, raising his eyebrows at Charles. “But I want to, for your mother. I think it’s important to honour our parents.”

“Thank you,” Charles couldn’t stop himself seizing the man’s hands, long-fingered and scoured with old burns like the shadows of wires, and kissing them. “Thank you, truly, thank you.”

The next morning he had the cook make a lunch of buttered artichoke hearts, yellow cuts of cheese, a bottle of diluted wine and fresh bread. He brought the food to the jeweller’s workshop, and sat on a stool chattering and picking at the artichokes while the artisan finished setting thin plates of lapis lazuli into the pure silver. The workshop backed onto a washer’s yard, so they ate on the front step, watching the city bustle back and forth.

“Your mother must be very lucky,” Charles said. “You must make the most beautiful gifts for her.”

“I’m afraid my mother was dead long before I began my trade,” the jeweller replied.

Charles’ cheeks flushed so pink he coughed into his hand in an attempt to hide it. “I apologise. That was thoughtless of me.”

“Not at all. I thought of her often, making your mother’s set,” the jeweller raised his cup. “Let’s drink to remember them.”

Charles thought of his mother, telling him not to cut his hair, of how she’d always been proud of him the way she was proud of her favourite rings and the pendants Marko bought her from the markets. He clacked his clay mug against the other man’s, but drunk more than his fair share of the bottle. Feeling overheated by the sun and the wine, he licked his bottom lip as he looked at the jeweller, taking in properly the man’s severe profile and the divine cut of his cheekbones.

“Do you go to the gymnasium?” he asked, waving his mug vaguely in the direction of the city centre. “We should meet there some time.”

“I don’t go out often,” the jeweller said, draining his cup. “I have my work.”

Charles had never, in his memory, been rebuffed with such casual disinterest. His whole life, he had ensnared the attentions of men and women alike with the barest hint of an invitation. He had seen others – usually married women, or men from one of the ascetic cults – resist with obvious pain and frustration. He had never been openly _refused_.

This was the moment that ignited the long fuse that led to Charles falling in love with Erik the jeweller, and fomented all the events that would follow, events that would shake even the mountain of the gods.

\---

Charles had correctly surmised Erik's foreign blood. The jeweller had been born in a Germanic tribe in cold and distant lands. At a young age he had been enslaved, along with his mother and most of his tribe, and marched across the continent in abysmal conditions that left only five of the captives alive. Having survived the long journey to warmer climates the pair were sold to an elderly couple who had, in their twilight years, made a fortune in the import business. 

The master of the house was exceedingly fond of Erik's mother and took her to bed whenever possible; his wife berated his overindulgence but was happy to escape her own marital duties. Erik's mother was by no means a broken slave, and on her request the master assigned some rudimentary education for Erik – thus he was the only slave in the neighbourhood who could read, if haltingly, and knew enough politics to keep up a conversation with guests at his master's parties. 

After almost a decade, Erik's mother accrued enough in gifts and tips from her master and his guests to buy her son's freedom, which the master happily granted. It was likely Erik would have spent the rest of his days as a free servant, but the very next year came the winter of the plague. Making no distinction between slaves and citizens, it claimed huge swathes of the city, including Erik's mother, her mistress, and most of the household. 

Erik stayed with his mother throughout the short, vicious illness. He sang to her until his throat was raw. He nursed her until she had nothing but blood and bile left to evacuate from her body. He cleaned her until the sores on her skin blackened and became too sensitive for even the lightest touch of a wet cloth. Every waking minute the boy prayed to the city's Gods to let her live, one insignificant slave, let her slip through death's net. He prayed to Shaw, the king of the Gods and of the ocean, to Frost, his queen and goddess of women and wealth, to Logan, the God of health and feasting, to Angel, goddess of love and the night, to Riptide, God of the weather and the seasons, and even Azazel, the patron of the hearth and the messenger of the Gods. He asked any one of them who had any compassion to save his mother. 

None did. 

When the plague subsided, the economy of the city went with it. Destitute, the master-no-longer sold the remaining slaves. He and Erik left their home and went to live with the master's son, who was a renowned jeweller in the very _polis_ where Charles was born and raised.

The jeweller soon found that Erik had a talent for metalwork that far surpassed the many freeborn aides he'd hired over the years. As soon as he could, he contracted Erik to be his full-time apprentice. Though he demanded much and gave little praise, he eventually passed the workshop on to Erik when cataracts claimed his eyesight and his artistry. Erik, in turn, supported the old jeweller and the jeweller's now very-ancient father and in his hands the business bloomed. 

When the most beautiful youth in the _polis_ began courting him, Erik was at a loss to how he should behave. Charles loitered around the workshop almost every day, bringing Erik gifts of food and asking him to the theatre, or the spectacle of the public courts, or to the bath houses to relax after a long day’s work. Erik received the gifts graciously, but turned down the invitations again and again. It was true that he had a lot of work to do, though the burden was entirely of his own making – Erik underpriced his skills, and the workshop could easily have subsisted on half the sales if he had charged customers for his true worth. It was also true that he had never been courted before, and found himself reacting about as well to the attention as a cat would if it had gone pawing for fish in a small fountain and been suddenly confronted by a huge shark. It was as confusing as it was terrifying.

Although Charles in himself wasn’t that terrifying. In fact, Erik allowed the youth to seduce him in less than a week. Charles called it “an extra thank-you” for the work he’d done on the funerary jewels. Erik suspected this was rather like when Charles had brought round a whole basket of honeycakes the day after the cremation – “as a gift from my household, everyone agreed Mother looked so lovely” and then eaten more than half of them while he was waiting for Erik to finish burnishing the rings he’d made that day. 

That didn’t mean he hadn’t enjoyed the remainder of the honeycakes, and it didn’t mean it didn’t enjoy the sight of Charles licking long stripes up his cock, his eyes hanging closed and his throat making soft hums as he groped at the top of Erik’s thigh. And, whether it was midday and he had hours of work left, or near midnight and Charles was drunk and smelling of cheap perfumes, he didn’t ever fail to open the door for the most beautiful youth in the _polis_. 

Erik had never met anyone he could speak so freely to, who laughed at every gruff joke he made as if it was the funniest thing they’d heard all day. Charles had so many different smiles that Erik couldn’t help but stare at him when he spoke, wondering if he could get the lapidarist to cut a stone with so many facets. Other times he had to look away and bury himself in his work, he found Charles’ lean limbs and the sharp curve where his neck met his shoulders so intensely distracting. After a few weeks Erik began to realize that his terror no longer stemmed from his unfamiliarity of the situation, but of it ending. Charles boasted of his conquests on many occasions, and his reputation would have given him away even if he’d kept his mouth shut. 

“I’m so comely I befriended a nymph in the forest,” he once claimed.

“No you didn’t,” Erik said at once.

“I did!” Charles cried, mock-offended. “Her name is Raven, and she could have taken any form to escape me, but she couldn’t resist. I turned her down only because everyone knows the terrible spells nymphs can cast on you if you break their hearts,” he smirked.

That was Erik’s fear. That this was a mere fling, that he was a challenge or a game to Charles. That it could only end in his heart being broken. 

\---

“Charles, my son,” Marko said over one of the rare evening meals they shared together. “I have a proposition for you.”

Charles looked up at his stepfather, who lay stretched along his couch with his hairy ankles sticking out the end of his _peplos_. 

“Do tell, Papa,” Charles said, pushing his lentils around his bowl with his bread. 

“A dear friend of mine has asked if you would make a wife of his daughter,” Marko said, smoothing his bare crown with one hand.

“Oh, tosh!” said the maid, who was waiting at the side for them to finish eating. She had been Charles’ mother’s slave, the same one who’d first taken him to Erik’s workshop. “Charles is much too young to be married. He’s barely twenty; he does not have the experience to start his own household for at least ten years.”

“Nonsense. He’s a very independent young man,” Marko waved his hand in the general direction of his stepson.

Charles cleared his throat. “Whom do you wish me to marry?”

“Moira, daughter of MacTaggert the lesser.”

“That hard-nosed shrew!” the maid cried. “Oh, sir, you can’t be serious. She must be at least four years older than Charles, fit now for nothing more than a priestess of Frost-”

“Be quiet,” Marko snapped. “Well, Charles? Do you know of her?”

“Of course,” Charles said. In fact, he could not believe that he and his stepfather’s wishes could coincide so perfectly. “She’s one of the cleverest people in the city.”

“You mean on of the cleverest _women_ in the city,” Marko corrected.

“You always prove me right, Papa,” Charles lifted his cup to him, smiling broadly as Marko completely failed to pick up on the jab. He continued quickly, “She is the niece of the great naval commander, the senior MacTaggert. People say she helped him redesign the navy’s tactics in the last war, while her father was away-”

“Yes, well, when he came back he put a stop to all that nonsense,” Marko scowled. “And you can see why potential suitors shy away from her, tarnished and mouthy as she is.”

“I think she’s admirable,” Charles said. “I’ve always wanted to meet her.”

“Good. Then you shall, and no doubt you will charm her as you do so many others,” Marko sneered and held out his goblet for more wine. “And of course, her father being the greatest horse-trader within a hundred miles, her dowry should make a comfortable beginning to your new home.”

Charles nearly choked on his wine, and quickly spat it back into his cup and pretended to be sneezing. Ah. So that was Marko’s plan – overwhelm his stepson with the responsibilities of a new house and family, cut all ties and thus keep all the wealth left behind by his mother and father for Marko and his son. How pleased he must have been when the younger MacTaggert approached him, desperate to find a husband for his daughter. And Marko thought Moira could never refuse Charles, because no one refused Charles, and Marko could not conceive of a woman who wanted for anything more than a handsome husband who gave her pretty trinkets. 

But then again – who was the loser in all this? Once he was married, Charles would be free. Marko could no longer give him a single order or make veiled threats about his improprieties. He could live in his own house with a wife who knew how to talk politics and military history, who would give him clever sons. He could have Erik come and stay whenever he liked, could even throw his own parties and introduce Erik to his friends. 

“Very well, Papa,” Charles said, keeping his tone stilted, “Invite MacTaggert and his daughter to dine so that he may meet me and judge my fitness. Then we shall see.”

\---

Charles found that he could get into Erik’s workshop despite all the locks and bars on the door. He climbed the back wall, used the washing-yard’s baskets to reach the back window and crawled in through the tiny portal. It had been two nights since he and his bride-to-be had been introduced (supervised by female slaves from both families.) Charles had been totally smitten by Moira’s forthright discussion of their situation. She had asked him straight away, “Do you think you can keep control of a bitter old spinster like myself?”

Charles found himself blathering, “Your work as a naval tactician was breathtaking. I would never dream of letting such a mind go to waste.”

Moira had paused, and for the span of a blink looked just a little bit flattered. Yes, Charles thought, my charms truly _are_ irresistible. And in this case genuine. He had even sent a messenger to Erik’s workshop asking him to make a necklace fit for a bride on her wedding day – he had not, of course, mentioned whose bride she would be.

He ambushed Erik in the dark workhop, tackling him around the waist and pinning his arms to the wall, crushing a heated kiss against his lips before he could shout an alarm. 

“The necklace you ordered is on the table,” Erik said professionally when Charles finally released his mouth. 

“I’ll get it in a bit. Mmm, You smell of gold dust and sweat,” Charles whispered, and sucked at the pulse in Erik’s neck.

“You don’t smell of sex with someone else, which makes a change,” Erik rumbled. Despite his height advantage, he did not have the leisure to spend every day practising his wrestling and sprints the way Charles did. He squirmed and gave a half-hearted attempt to break from Charles’ grasp, but Charles held him firm. 

“I only smell like that to make you jealous.”

“You know me. I’m jealous of everything that touches you,” Erik replied. He stopped struggling and shifted his knee between Charles’ legs, stroking very slowly up the inside of Charles’ thigh, “Your tunic. The dust under your feet. The dog that licks your hand.”

“You’re welcome to lick my hand,” Charles gave a shiver as Erik’s gently pressing leg reached his groin. Erik took this chance to twist his wrists out of the smaller man’s grip and take hold of his head, pulling him close. 

Charles wanted to say something more – tell Erik he’d missed him these last few days, warn Erik that he was going to fuck him like a stag on a doe tonight, complain to Erik that the floor of this workshop wasn’t softer and they’d have to make it all way into the guest suite without releasing their lips or tripping over – but Erik’s hand was already shoving up the skirt of his chiton to dig rough fingers into his hip and slide them around to his buttock.

Some time later, lying on their sides with their heads together and Erik’s arm draped over Charles’ waist, Charles said, “I’m going to be married.”

Erik had been dozing, but his eyes snapped open at these words. “To whom?”

“A good woman. You’ll like her.”

Erik’s face turned hard as molten steel suddenly plunged into water. “I hate her.”

“My love,” Charles traced a line with his forefinger between Erik’s eyes and down the symmetrical axis of his profile. “Everything will be just the same as it is now. I shall be busier, perhaps. That’s all.”

Erik turned his head away from his touch and withdrew the hand from Charles’ waist. “My mother told me it was wrong to pollute a marriage by bringing in others. That’s how it was among her people.”

“How dull,” Charles wrinkled his nose, but the look on Erik’s face at these words made him apologise at once. “I didn’t mean that, I’m sorry.”

“Then leave, if people are so easy for you to collect,” Erik muttered, rolling onto his back and settling his hands on his bare chest. “I’m done with this.”

“Don’t be a child,” Charles reached out for Erik’s cock, but Erik grabbed his hand and shoved it away.

“Well? Go!” he snarled, raising himself onto his elbows. “Or must I throw you out like a displeasing whore?”

Charles spat back something bitter, he didn’t afterwards remember what, and Erik’s voice got louder and flintier as Charles gathered his clothes in the dark. His shoulder hit the edge of the wine stand and the near-empty jug shattered with a crack and clatter like thrown coins. Charles cursed Erik and his piety, and Erik’s voice changed into a cold and brittle croak and said there was nothing pious about it, how _dare_ Charles call him that. Charles didn’t know how he had conjured that voice out of his lover like a shade from the underworld and left in a hurry because the way Erik was standing in the near-darkness, a silhouette stony and quivering, made him genuinely afraid that Erik _would_ try and throw him out. Then it would likely come to blows, and he could already feel a deep bruise rising on his shoulder from where it had hit the wine stand. He didn’t need any more.

He took the necklace for Moira with him, but it felt far heavier than the thin beads belied. 

\---

If Charles thought things had gone badly there, he had not counted on his stepfather’s ability to take problems in his life and amplify them simply by spitting them loudly into Charles’ face. 

“Your indiscretions have gone on long enough, Charles!” he raged, the moment he got home from a wander in the marketplace the next day.

“Which of my long list has pushed you over the edge, sir?” Charles asked cautiously. After the fight with Erik, his insides still felt like they were being pelted with heavy, cold rain. 

“I hear about this dalliance! With a slummy _artisan!_ ” Marko paced back and forth, cloak tangled up on one arm when he had tried and failed to throw it on the floor in his rage. “My son, your affairs with married women I kept secret to prevent my own humiliation, but this – this is too uncouth even for you. He is a foreigner. An ex-slave! Why don’t you just go lie with the swine?”

“Where did you hear this?” Charles snapped. The brimming resistance he had always harboured against his stepfather, against the stuffy expectations of all elders, was suddenly breaking through its flood banks. “Are you convicting me on the wisps of rumours now?”

“MacTaggert knows!” Marko howled, spinning to shove his scrawny face into Charles’. “He says he cannot marry his daughter to a man with no moral control!”

Charles took a step back. The tiles felt too cold under his feet, and he clutched at the necklace still stowed down the front of his tunic. He had carried it all morning, turning the delicate, hanging slats between his fingers and admiring the tiny red gems Erik had set exquisitely into the gold. He said, sounding stupid even in his own ears, “But you fuck slaves all the time.”

“Decorum and pleasure are not incompatible,” Marko made a ripping motion in the air. “But you _pursue_ him, Charles, that is what MacTaggert finds so repulsive. They say you court him and bring him gifts, though he is your senior – why, at your age you should be the one being wooed by older men, with my mediation. You should not go about… _prostituting_ yourself to street merchants!”

Since his mother’s wedding, Charles had never had the desire to lay his hand on his stepfather. He had not needed to use violence to get what he desired since he was a child. But now he wanted to seize the collar of old Marko’s tunic and smash his balding head into the corner of the stone doorway. The torrent of rain inside him had turned into a thunderstorm. 

He took a long shuddering breath. He could still save one future for himself. “The affair with this man has ended. What do you suggest I do, Papa? _Prostitute_ myself in front of MacTaggert in the hopes that he forgives me?”

Marko swept back a few paces and turned his gaze on the shrine to Shaw at the edge of the room. He grumbled, “I will speak on your behalf. He hinted that if there was some way for you to prove yourself-”

“Whatever I need to do,” Charles said in a voice like a taut wire. “I’ll do it.”

\---

Erik did not sleep for two days. When he tried to concentrate on the raw metals he found his hands shook and he had to stop for fear of burning himself. He washed his face and went to his design table, trying to scrawl the commissions that his clients were waiting on, but the charcoal skidded in harsh lines across the wooden offcuts he used instead of expensive parchment, then crunched and broke in his grip. There was no way he would be able to wield the tiny hammers and pliers which he needed to set stones and engrave rings. He gave up and left the workshop, stalking the streets until he began to feel his fair skin redden. 

When he returned, Charles was sitting on the threshold. He was too deep in some dream to see Erik until he was less than two paces away, at which point he raised his head and leapt to his feet. 

Erik didn’t speak. He let Charles babble apologies for a while, finally interrupting with, “But you are still to be married.”

“Yes,” Charles said, the face that had broken a thousand hearts scrunched up in an ugly squint against the sun pouring over Erik’s shoulder. “I am.”

“Then do not come to me with empty entreaties—”

“Erik,” Charles crossed the thin space between them and took hold of Erik’s arms above the elbows. Erik’s whole body shuddered at the touch. He wanted to twist his fingers through Charles’ hair and throw him down into the dirt of the street, right here, bring him off for any slave or lofty politician to see, so that there would be no more room for shame between them. And then Charles said, “Erik, I’m going to do my military service.”

Erik’s felt the city come to a halt around him, quiet as the faraway streets in another town when the plague had laid its blanket over all the populace.

“You should be proud,” Charles said, without any pride himself. “I should have done it before now. But Moira’s father – he says, he said, or Marko convinced him I don’t know – that if I do my service, I will marry his daughter and have his love and all besides that, whatever we will ever need.”

“It’s two years,” Erik croaked.

“I’m young, and there is no war,” the corner of Charles’ mouth twitched. “It will be two years lying about on ships and guarding sunny outposts, among other handsome, strong young men. What is disagreeable about that?” he said, even managing to put into his words a hint of the salacious voice that made Erik’s balls tighten just hearing it.

“Why are you telling me this?” Erik said. He didn’t know how he managed to speak when he couldn’t even breathe.

“I didn’t want to leave things as they were between us.” 

Erik felt the skin of anger and principles shed from his body and blow away. He grasped Charles’ face and pressed it into his own, his lower lip bruised by Charles’ teeth even as he tried to invade deeper into the kiss. “Don’t go,” he mumbled into Charles’ mouth after what must have been minutes. “Find another way. I’ll forgive you – I’ll even share you – just don’t go.”

“Everything will work out,” Charles promised, smoothing down the hair on both sides of Erik’s head. “You’ll see. Gods willing, it will all work out.”

\---

The night before he was to march out with the other young men on service, Charles went to Erik and found him not sleeping, though it was very late, but waiting in the workshop with a candle burning on the windowsill.

There was a small travel bag sitting beside his stool.

“What’s this?” Charles asked. 

Erik reached across to his bench and turned back with two long, cloth-wrapped shapes cradled in his arms. Silently he held the nearest out for Charles to take. Charles felt the weight of it and knew, before he even unwrapped the blade, that it was the finest sword he had ever held.

“I had them made by a smith I know, Alex of Summers Street,” Erik said quietly. “He forges only the best. I chose the alloys myself. Not those gold-plated toys you rich men favour.”

“There are two,” Charles said, balancing the sword in his hand but keeping his eyes on Erik’s face.

“I’m coming with you,” Erik rasped. “I’ll bear your shield and strip your armour at the end of the day. I’ll bandage you if you’re cut.”

Charles shook his head. “Marko has given me a slave for these duties.”

“Then dismiss him!” Erik cried, slamming his own sword back onto the bench. “I will trust no one else with your safety!”

“Erik,” Charles laid the gift in his own lap and cupped Erik’s cheek. He felt the short beard move soft against his skin as Erik grasped his hand and turned to kiss Charles’ palm. “Thinking of you is what will bring me home.”

“Nothing else?” Erik growled.

“You know I care for Moira too, or I would not be doing this – oh, but believe what you want, you foolish man,” Charles smiled. “Nothing else.”

\---

The new recruits marched out of the city the next morning, breastplates newly-polished and spears standing tall across their shoulders as if to scare away any cloud that dared to invade the perfect blue sky. Erik had climbed onto the balustrade of the front steps outside the temple of Frost. Shading his eyes, he watched the troops pass like animated statues of glories past. Their faces all seemed lifeless inside the enclosed walls of their helmets. Wives and mothers shaded by their shawls called oaths of love and pride, and children ran back and forth with baskets of flower petals, hurling handfuls into the air. 

Despite the regimented march, Erik spotted Charles by his gait. He hollered until the helmeted head turned towards him and he saw the gleam of blue eyes and the sliver of a smile. 

“You are my world!” Erik bellowed, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Don’t seduce the _whole_ navy!”

Faintly, he heard Charles call back, “Bring me home!” and grinned, waving with his whole arm until the recruits disappeared around the next corner. 

It would be the last time they saw each other in their mortal lives.


	2. the eagle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains gore and explicit non-con. 
> 
> I had for real forgotten how not-nice this fic is.

“Fall back!” Charles bellowed. “Back to the ships! Fall back!”

His men resounded the cry along the broken line of their phalanx. The air smelled of blood and the fetid estuary, a scent so thick it seemed to vibrate with the screams of the dying. Charles saw a fellow lieutenant twenty feet away gutted by the edge of a long spear, pieces of him flowing out from his writhing body like a ready-made funeral bouquet. The men were hauling each other up as their sandals were sucked into the wet sand, trying to keep their shield and spears facing toward the enemy so that they could hold the line. The dying lieutenant’s men staggered in the retreat, the sand’s surface maimed by the battle taking place upon it. It would all be wiped clean when the tide came in. 

Charles could see they would be overcome long before they reached the messily reforming body of the retreating army. He clashed his spear against his shield, “To me, to me!” he called to his own men, gesturing to the stragglers. They plunged back to the fray and engulfed the exhausted soldiers in their ranks, pulling the injured up and quickening their pace back the ship.

“We should never have left the ships!” one of Charles’ men bellowed, deflecting a spear with his shield and hacking off the hand attached to it. “Their fleet will cut us off at the mouth of the bay before the reserve hoplites arrive by land!”

“Our ships are far superior, we’ll rout their fleet and drive them into the coves and onto the hoplite’s swords,” almost too late, Charles saw the jab of another razor-tipped spear. He slammed forward with the edge of his shield, staying low and breaking the wooden shield of his opponent. On his right, one of his men screamed as an enemy spear punched through his weapon-arm above the elbow, rupturing the flesh as it withdrew to leave muscles hanging in dripping chunks. 

Once upon a time, Charles would have vomited at the sight. Once upon a time, he could not have envisioned killing another man, would have done anything and everything to avoid it. But that was before the sudden onset of war, the year-long extension to his military service, before the scars he’d gathered, before responsibility had become his slave-driver. Every day he woke up, aching, skin crusted with sea-salt, and wanted nothing more than to go home to his city, to the new house and lovely wife that MacTaggert had promised him, and most of all to a gruff ex-slave with a smile like a guillotine and a longing in his face that made Charles want to sow them together at the hip.

But every day the war went on, and Charles’ men needed him. 

Right now he was too close for his enemy to use their spear; he smashed the man’s face in with the edge of his shield and them dived back to protect his injured soldier, who had fallen into the mud. His eyes were wide and rolled back in his head, his face splattered with dark grey sand mixed in with blood. Charles knelt over him, propping the shield between them and the oncoming horde and stabbing his own spear toward the groin of the next bastard who came at them. The man howled and fell gushing blood. 

Charles’ men had rushed in to retrieve the injured soldier, but as Charles stood to follow, the sand swallowed his foot to the ankle and he lost his balance. His other leg went from under him. He went down hard with a squelch that was almost comic, his head thrown back with a painful jolt to his neck from the weight of his helmet.

Distantly, he could see an eagle circling against the grey clouds.

_“Lieutenant!”_

“Get to the ships! Leave me!” Charles answered, struggling to his feet. The enemy line was upon him and around him now. He crouched and spun, trying to make his shield encompass the whole three-sixty degrees, but a spear clashed against it and then something knocked his feet out and he fell again, pain blossoming from his weak leg, the one that Marko had gashed at his mother’s wedding all those years ago.

He could no longer see his men retreating through the forest of enemy soldiers. He raised his shield to block the sword that one had pulled on him, and lashed out with his spear, but he couldn’t get any thrust behind it from where he was crouched. 

It hit him that he was about to die, and he lost all sense of dignity and discipline, lunged and parried without control, his heart exploding in his chest. He did not want to die, not after three years away from home and two years of bloody war, he wanted to die of old age in his bed with his lovers and grandchildren around him. Gods, don’t let this be it, don’t let him become one of those honoured heroes who inspired another ignorant generation of youths to take up arms-

The blood of his enemy burst hot and stinking across him as he slashed through an artery. He raised his head to avoid the spray and saw the eagle was still there, spiralling down to feed on what would soon be a carrion-feast. 

It was an oddly large eagle, moving oddly fast.

There was a burst of red light across his vision and a thunderclap that reverberated through his shield and arms, that blew the enemy around him outwards and scattered them like toys. Charles crouched under his shield, trying to shake the ringing from his head and blink the sight back into his eyes.

The eagle landed before him, so huge that at its beak it stood half as tall again as the tallest man Charles had ever seen. Its feathers were a deep, mottled red and the image of it seemed to shift back and forth like a drug-dream – it was an eagle, but it was a human figure as well, blurred and faceless but masculine and rippling with life. 

“My God,” Charles breathed, because every instinct told him that was what it was, that was the only thing it could be, and he threw himself onto his face in the sand and clasped his hands in worship.

The eagle screamed, and Charles heard the thunderclap of its wings, and felt talons stronger than bronze seize him around the waist and neck. And then there was a sickening rush of movement and the earth was pulling away from him. The soldiers below had become small as children, then small as mice, and he could see the troops had reached the ships and were pushing away from the shore one trireme at a time. 

The eagle tightened its claws around Charles and he closed his eyes. He tried not to struggle. 

\---

It was a bleak winter's morning with a cold and empty sky the day the troops came home. After two years of sudden war - and a year longer spent in military service than most of the young soldiers had expected - the _polis_ packed the streets to welcome their heroes home. It had been a cruel two years in the city as well, with trade disrupted and businesses failing, a hard season driving the food prices up, and the severely injured men who survived infection returning home to families they could no longer support. Every three or four months a list of the honoured dead would be read at the agora, and Erik would drop everything he was working on to go and listen. As the announcer lowered his scroll and roused the crowd into cheers for the dead men, he would slip away with a huge pressure lifted from his skin at not having heard Charles’ name.

But now the soldiers were returned, and the pressure was worse than ever. It had been three years, and Charles had been through a war, shoulder to shoulder with freeborn men who were stronger and richer and better educated than Erik. Would Charles care to see him? Would he even remember the surly artisan he had captivated? Would Erik still recognise the rakish, pampered playboy who he’d promised to bring home, or would Charles be a soldier and a true citizen now, brown-skinned and rough-voiced and beyond childish things like casual lovers? 

That day he had to make a dozen of the simple circlets that were in fashion these days, so he got up before dawn and worked right through until late morning before grabbing a bread roll to eat on the way into town. The old jeweller had purchased a slave to run the store in an alcove they had hired a couple of streets over, so Erik left the wares there. 

The crowd was already three blocks deep surrounding the agora, and despite the cool air there was an atmosphere of mirth. Children were smiling and the women were in their brightest veils and wearing flowers in their hair. Someone was playing a fast tune on an aulos and dancers knocked into the crowd and dashed away, laughing. Erik shouldered his way through for what felt like hours, his heart sprinting every time he saw a soldier in their casual tunic uniforms going the other direction. But they were all men with their arms around their fathers or wives, and none were Charles. 

At last he reached the agora where the remaining troops were milling. He had to detour around a packed cluster of euphoric worshippers who had set up a shrine on the edge of the open ground, to some minor god who had probably performed a recent miracle or protected the soldiers in battle. 

The crowd was sparser here, restricted to the soldiers greeting their families or simply accepting gifts from the civilians. Erik wandered for almost half an hour, turning his head until his neck hurt, twitching in hope every time he saw a stout figure or blue eyes. At last he began to ask the soldiers for help.

“Do you know a Charles son of Brian? He’s listed as a lieutenant in the third division, do you know how I can find him? Does anyone know a Charles, only son of Brian?”

A tall soldier with hooded eyes took pity on him. “Do you know his ship’s name?”

Erik shook his head.

“Most of the third division isn’t coming in until tomorrow, but two of their ships arrived with us. There’s one of their riggers over there, Sean, that bright fellow-”

Erik thanked him and hurried over to a red-headed man standing with his hands on his hips, boasting to a cluster youths who sat or stood in front of him, their mouths agape. Erik hovered until the soldier glanced over at him. Something in his face must have shown he was not here for the storytelling, because Sean turned quickly. In fact, he settled into a sure-footed position that looked distinctly defensive. Erik’s foreignness was explicit as always, it seemed, and the grim expression he was wearing had put the soldier on guard. As if Erik would have any chance of taking him in a fight – he was a jeweller, not a boxer, for the gods’ sake. 

“Can I help you, friend?” Sean asked quietly.

“You’re with the third division?” Erik waited only long enough for Sean’s small nod and then plunged ahead, “Do you know a lieutenant named Charles? He’s an only son, born in the suburb of Neapolis Yorkos?”

“Yeah, of course,” Sean’s face shifted in an instant, his features softening. He looked like the sort of rough-and-ready joker that Erik always avoided because they made him feel like a sour elder ruining the party. “We all knew him.”

“Knew,” Erik echoed in a croak. The packed dirt seemed to ripple under him like a ground-quake. 

“You want to go over there,” Sean pointed, back the way Erik had come. “They’ve set up a shrine, they’re all praying there. Have at it, I’m sure he loves the attention.”

Erik shook his head and scrubbed his hands down his face. Sean was about to turn back to his admirers, but Erik grabbed the man’s elbow. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand – I’m a friend of his, I thought he’d be coming home today. Where is he?”

Sean’s mouth opened as he realised the confusion. He put his hand over Erik’s and gently pulled it off his elbow, taking it between his own. His palms were warm and gritty with rope-hewn calluses. “Are you Erik?”

“I – yes,” Erik didn’t think he could answer questions with more than one word at a time. His head felt like it was full of howling wind. 

“He talked about you, friend,” the corner of Sean’s mouth twitched. “You’re as striking to look at as he bragged. I’m sorry, but he’s gone – he vanished.”

“What?” Erik still hadn’t managed to restore the two-word stage of his conversation abilities. “Deserted?” Charles wouldn’t – would he? He’d never seemed like a keen fighter, but not a coward, not his Charles…

“Not by any account. It was at the battle of Grulos Limhn, three months past. They say he was carried away by a giant red eagle, that’s what the lads under his command say. I don’t really know much more than that, the men don’t like to talk about it – you don’t speculate about the Gods’ handiwork, do you? That’s just asking to be eaten by sea-monsters. Best to accept it and keep your face to the wind.”

“Yes. Um,” Erik twitched his hands out of Sean’s grasp and stepped backwards, raising his arms as if in surrender. “Thank you. I have to… thank you.”

He spun and began to walk, terrified that Sean would call out to him or ask him to come back, to join them for celebrations or remembrances. Erik didn’t want to be a stranger in this pack of humans right now. The smiles cut at him, the women’s flowers hurt his eyes, the easy laughs of the soldiers made him shudder. He staggered until he reached the thicker throngs at the edge of the agora and couldn’t make his way through. Or perhaps he just didn’t have the strength; he no longer felt attached to his own body.

The shrine he had passed on his way in reared up. The priest in front of it, dressed in the white and red-trimmed robes of a servant of Shaw, was blessing those who had come to worship while a slave behind him prepared a sacred snake for sacrifice. The animal moved in sleek twists and sudden lunges, familiar with being handled but perhaps somehow aware that its fate lay locked in the glint of the silver knife on the priest’s belt. 

“The augurs have studied the birds at length and sought inspiration in the council’s dreams,” the priest warbled, “Charles, son of Brian, born of this city, was exalted unto the mountain of the Gods by Shaw himself. He now serves the gods as their cupbearer, is erômenos of the king of the gods, and is made immortal.”

The priest’s voice rose into a hymn of praise for Shaw and for the veneration the God bestowed on the young. In Erik’s ears, the words became an unintelligible roar. He fell to his knees in the dirt in front of Charles’ shrine, his hands ripping at the collar of his chiton, tearing bruises and bloody scratches that would last for days into the flesh of his breast. 

“He is beloved of Shaw! In the time of our victory, our city is honoured beyond measure!” 

Three years. _The Gods’ handiwork_. Keep your face to the wind. Three years of waiting and the bitter resolution broke over Erik and drew him into unconsciousness.

\---

Someone roused Erik and he ended up back in his workshop with no memory of the long walk home. For three days he stayed inside, working the metal and setting semi-precious stones and drawing wires from hot lumps of copper. The jewellery was some of the finest he’d ever created, though he couldn’t see it himself. He drank water and diluted wine when the old jeweller’s slave left it on the bench for him, but touched no food.

On the fourth day he rose before dawn as always, planning to start on a pair of rings one of his regular customers had commissioned for his daughter and new son-in-law. He couldn’t find some of his tools, and hunted for them for almost an hour, growing dizzy with frustration and hunger. 

At last he upturned an old chest in the corner, and out tumbled the leather roll with the tools he needed – and a long, thin shape wrapped in cloth. Erik knelt and picked it up, cradling it in his elbows. It was the sword he’d bought so that he could accompany Charles on his military service. If Charles had allowed him… if he had been there… maybe he could have… 

_You can’t fight a god with a mortal’s sword, no matter how fine,_ the last of his good sense pointed out. 

Was Charles a god himself now? Could he see Erik crouched here grieving? He wouldn’t want Erik to waste himself like this. But what _would_ he want? And what did Erik want – to ride out his grief and then move on with life as it was? No. 

Erik unwrapped the sword and looked down at it. “You said I would bring you home,” he whispered. “And I will.”

\---

Alex was probably the only person who Erik called ‘friend’ and meant it. Born into a wealthy family of potters, Alex had never given his parents a dull moment from the day he was born, and spent his teens rousing trouble against the city’s assembly. His father had eventually disowned him, though he was still on good terms with his brother. By that time he had attached himself to a crotchety old blacksmith who encouraged his civil rebellions and taught him his trade. After several years of vandalism and constant debt from the fines the courts imposed on him, Alex had been mellowed by discovering enlightenment in one of the many cults that had sprung up across the land. He worked his own smithy now, and those his reputation as a troublemaker kept away a lot of businesss, his few customers were loyal and knew the quality of his work. 

On one of the many festivals when artisans put down their tools, Erik visited Alex for the first time in months, bringing the sword with him. They drank on the roof of Alex’s apartment, a level above the smithy, and talked about the current council and business and their hopes that things would pick up now the war was over.

Erik didn’t mention anything about Charles, but Alex was nothing if not connected to the grapevine of the city and was already well informed. When a break in the conversation appeared, he licked his lips and asked in his low baritone, “Your man didn’t come home from war, did he?”

Erik’s eyes slid past Alex’s face to look out over the city. Music and drumbeats from the parades floated distantly up through the low terraces. He shook his head.

“So it _was_ him, the one Shaw elevated,” Alex grimaced and wiped a sheen of wine from his mouth. “I wondered. Guess you weren’t kidding when you said he was the most beautiful man in the world.”

“Is,” Erik corrected with a grunt. “He _is_.”

“Course, sorry,” Alex rolled his shoulders back and balanced his cup on his muscled stomach, between his folded hands. “You tried praying to him?”

“No.”

“He can probably hear you,” Alex glanced up at the rivers of clouds. “I’m sure he _wants_ to hear you-”

“I didn’t come here to be consoled, Alex,” Erik cut him off.

Alex watched him for a few seconds. His goblet moved up and down with his breathing. Finally he put Erik out of his misery by asking, “Then what did you come here for?”

“You’re a faithful of the Cult of Darwin, aren’t you?”

Alex sat up a little, his expression guarded. “You know I can’t talk about that, Erik.”

“I know, I’m not asking for cult secrets or for you to break your vows,” Erik said quickly. “I just thought… I mean, in legend, Darwin was opposed to Shaw…”

“It’s not like that,” Alex relaxed a little, happy to correct Erik’s misconceptions about his god. His voice talk on a sermonising tone. “When Shaw formed the Conclave of Six and overthrew the titans, Darwin was supposed to be the seventh – however, he fought Shaw for control of the conclave, and Shaw banished him to rule in the underworld. But Darwin is the great survivor. He does not oppose Shaw anymore; to do so would be to bring about a war that would leave the earth and heavens burning.”

“But out of all the Gods, Darwin is the one I would pray to if I had enmity for Shaw and his Conclave?” Erik asked quietly. 

“Woah, woah!” Alex put his goblet down and raised his hands. “You can’t go around declaring that kind of thing, brother. The Gods could always be listening.” 

“But I’m right, aren’t I?”

Alex’s eyes were half-closed, and he folded his arms, but eventually shrugged. “As a servant of Darwin, I certainly don’t sacrifice to the others, that’s true enough.”

Erik bent forward over his knees, his chin in his hands. “I want to go to the Mount of the Conclave. I want to get Charles back.”

“You’re a madman. Why don’t you try to seduce the lady Frost while you’re at it, you’ll have more luck.”

“I’ll find a way,” Erik muttered.

After a long silence, Alex sighed and held out one hand. “Give me your sword.”

Erik raised his head with a frown.

“Come on, brother, I know you brought it,” Alex snapped. “I’ll take it to the next worship and have the cult bless it in Darwin’s name. Maybe it’ll give you some protection, at least until you come to your senses.”

\---

When he got home from the market a few days later, Erik opened the door to find the old jeweller’s slave waiting for him. He was holding a small package wrapped in fine, white leather. 

“What’s this?” Erik took the package, which fitted easily into one hand. It had an uneven shape that he knew meant a piece of jewellery, or several small pieces.

“I don’t know,” the slave mumbled. “It was left for you at the stall.”

“By whom?”

The slave shook his head. “I was talking to a customer, I didn’t see. It was just sitting on the table when I turned back, with your name scratched above it in chalk. I haven’t opened it,” he added humbly.

Erik dismissed him and put the package down while he took off his boots and washed his face. He drank and ate a little of the meal that had been left on his bench, and finally untied the straps and peeled back the leather of the package.

His breath left him in a rush and he leapt up so fast the stool toppled over. 

Sitting in the middle of the perfect white leather was a necklace that he recognised instantly, though he hadn’t laid eyes on it for more than three years. He always knew his own work, and this one he had poured his ingenuity into, creating a unique piece of long, rectangular gold beads hanging from the braided bronze wire, each slat inset with tiny rubies which formed the most auspicious constellations for love and good fortune. It was the bridal necklace that Charles had commissioned. Erik had only worked out afterwards that it was an engagement present for his own bride. 

How? How had it got here? Erik had never seen the necklace after Charles took it – in fact, he wasn’t even sure Charles had paid him the full fee for it before he left with the navy. Neither of them had spoken about. 

“It’s a sign,” Erik looked up. “You left this for me, didn’t you, Charles?”

He stumbled forward and picked up the necklace in his palm, rubbing his thumb over one of constellations: Aquila, the eagle. 

“What does this mean?” he asked aloud. “Is it assent? Or are you warning me? No – no, this necklace wasn’t meant for me,” he grimaced. “It was meant for someone else. Is that it? Is that who I need to help me?”

Feeling faint but rapturous with the discovery, he carefully folded the soft leather back over the necklace and tied it again. Tomorrow, he would pay a visit to the house of MacTaggert. 

\---

The old slave on the door had a back bent as an augur’s staff and a large birch stick, which Erik didn’t want to get too near.

“I need to speak to her, only for a few moments. From a distance if necessary,” Erik said through gritted teeth. 

“I don’t care what you need!” the old slave croaked, whipping the birch stick through the air with a sound that made Erik flinch. He’d never been treated unfairly during his childhood as a house slave, but he’d been whipped for mistakes and speaking back on plenty of occasions. “Go back to your den, you mongrel!”

“I’m a friend of a friend,” Erik insisted. “She’ll want to see me.”

“Do you think I care about that?” the slave swayed left and right on his hobbled feet. “Her father allows her no visitors which he has not previously approved. Go and take it up with him!”

Erik huffed and finally took a breath and dashed past the slave to the iron gate behind him. It led through to the lush courtyard of the house of MacTaggert, walkways lined with brightly painted statues and the gardens arranged around a tile-roofed, private well. When the slave tried to hit him with the birch stick, Erik managed to grab the base of it and hold it away, the slave still hanging off it. 

“Stop! Begone, or I shall call the kitchen hands to beat you!”

“Moira!” Erik yet, sticking his face right up against the bars of the gate. “Moira, I need to speak to you! I’m a friend of Charles!”

The slave continued to berate him at an increasingly high pitch and a couple of curious maids stuck their heads out of the nearest doorway. A pair of large, young slaves with arms like piles of bricks strode out of the east wing and Erik began to think that his approach might not have been his best idea. As he was preparing to give up and run, the figure of a noblewoman, her face tucked inside the folds of her veil, appeared in the doorway on the far side of the courtyard.

“Moira!” Erik called, not sure if she was or not. Her hand was the only part of her skin that he could see, pale and smooth against the dark blue of her robe. “I loved Charles! I need to find him again – if you can aid me, come find me! My name is Erik, I’m a jeweller in the low district!”

The burly slaves were sauntering his way. Erik let go of the birch rod and made a break for it, bolting away down the street when he heard the gate opening behind him, accompanied by yells for him to halt.

\---

For two days he worked from first thing in the morning and then finished early enough to go search for every scrap of information available on the Mount of the Conclave. Plenty of fanatics had tried to climb those holy slopes in the stories of history, but none had ever returned and no one had ever successfully made the ascent without the aid of a god. 

Erik could not think of a god he did not hate, except perhaps Darwin, who he was simply impartial towards. The rest of the gods had never done anything for Erik – had they prevented his father being slaughtered and his family enslaved? Had they saved his mother from the plague that took her and so many others in agony and fever? And now they had stolen a living man, for no reason but their own pleasure. Would they have cared if Charles had had children who were orphaned without him? Would they have cared if his troops had died on the battlefield with no leader? Would they have cared if he had been destined to be a great statesman, and his city had suffered the loss? 

Oh course not. They never did. 

Erik had his bag packed and hidden under the workshop bench and had made a strong sheath for the sword. He knew the shop would have enough leftover stock to survive a while, and Erik had left the box with all his savings – which contained enough to support his old wards comfortably for the rest of their lives – if he never returned. But he didn’t know where to start. 

Then one night came a knock on the door, when all the lamps had been blown out and Erik was just about to get undressed for bed. He grumbled and pulled his tunic back on, heading downstairs by touch alone until he found and unbolted the front door.

The moonlight was strong enough to outline the two figures – a tall woman in a cloak, her shawl over her head, and a young slave who was shifting from foot to foot in concern for his mistress’ safety. 

Erik swallowed. “Moira?”

“Well done, sir. May I come in?” the accent was aristocratic but there was force behind it that made Erik step back and hold the door open before he’d thought twice about it. He’d spent most of his youth learning to obey voices like that, or been beaten for his troubles. It made his stomach writhe that he could fall so easily back into the habit.

“Thank you,” Moira nodded at him as she stepped inside. Erik let the door fall shut and fumbled for the lamp and the flint. A few sparks later he turned around with the light aloft, and saw the lady Moira’s face for the first time.

She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, the very picture of old family blood, no doubt a perfect line of citizens stretching back into her pedigree on both sides. But there was intelligence there, too. There had to be, Erik thought, for Charles to have taken an interest.

“Please,” he gulped, wishing he didn’t sound so damn subservient as he dragged over a clean stool. “Sit down.”

Moira folded her skirts under her carefully as she sat, her eyes not leaving Erik’s face. “I’m sure you can guess that no one but my man here,” he indicated the slave by her side, “knows that I have left my house. I ask that you keep it that way, no matter who you have to lie to.”

“Very well,” Erik said. “Thank you for finding me. You see… I… well, I don’t know if you heard what happened to Charles…” what was he supposed to say? He had not expected her to come in person, he did not even know how she was supposed to help him.

Moira finished for him. “We’ve both lost someone we loved. And we don’t even have a body to burn or a tomb to weep on.”

Erik nodded mechanically. He burst out, “I intend to find him and bring him home.”

Moira’s eyes widened. “Are you mad?”

“Perhaps.”

She smiled for the first time. “I will help however I can – Gods strike me down if they will. I run my father’s household and keep all the accounts, so money will be no object.”

“It’s information I need. How to climb the Mount of the Conclave. How to escape it alive.”

“I’ll seek out every priest and philosopher I trust,” she twisted her dress between her hands, her slave still staying silent by her side with his arms behind his back. “I wish I could go with you, lend what help I could-”

“It’s too dangerous for a woman.”

Her eyes flashed in the lamplight. “I suppose the labyrinth was too dangerous for Ariadne, too, but Theseus still needed her.”

“Yes, but not to carry his shield.”

“That depends which historian you’re reading from.”

“Do you really want to throw your life away when mine alone will pay the due?”

Moira nodded, but clarified a moment later. “Very well, I will trust you with this. Is there anyone else Charles knew who might help us?”’

“I didn’t know many of his acquaintances. I’m sure if beds had memories we could find his friends behind half the doors in the city.”

“Erik, that’s cruel,” Moira said sharply. “He’d put that behind him.”

“What do you mean?” Erik rumbled with a frown. 

“He must have told you,” Moira said. “By the time we became engaged, he vowed to me that he had only one lover, that he needed only one. He promised me there would be no deceit between us, as long as I accepted his one infidelity. He asked me if you might come and live with us, once he was married, and I consented. He hoped we’d take as much liking to each other as he did of us.”

Erik stared at her. He wanted to say, _But he’s Charles,_ as if that were an explanation. He wanted to say bitterly, _I will never take a liking to you_ , but held his tongue. It couldn’t be true; surely it was a lie, part of Charles’ games? But why – why tell Moira so much about Erik but keep other indiscretions a secret? Surely Charles would only have complicated things for himself.

Erik stumbled over his words, changing the subject before Moira realised how much her words had stunned him. “He once said he’d befriended a nymph,” Erik frowned, straining his memory, “and that her name was Raven, I think. I don’t know if it was the truth. I wouldn’t begin to know where to find her.”

“I will see what I can learn,” Moira twitched as if she wanted to reach out to him but couldn’t quite bring herself to break that taboo. “I am glad you came to me.”

“I think it’s what Charles wanted,” Erik replied. “I… I received a sign from him. A necklace I made on his commission came back to me without explanation.”

Moira’s eyes widened, and she put a delicate hand to her throat as if choking.

“I know,” Erik nodded. “It’s remarkable-”

“Erik,” Moira said quickly. “I gave you back the necklace. I had my man deliver it to the shop.”

Erik said emptily, his heart dropping into his guts. “Oh,” and then after a pause, “Why?” 

Moira pressed her lips together. “I couldn’t bear to have it in the house, after what happened to Charles, it was breaking me,” she did reach out to him this time, putting her soft, perfumed hand over his huge, scarred one. “Melt it down if you can’t bear it either. Sell it on as new pieces.”

“No,” he shook his head, his voice struggling to emerge. “I’ll take it to the Mount and when he returns, he’ll put it around your neck and you’ll be married wearing it.”

She stood up, and her slave went to check outside that no one would see her leave the workshop. Very cautiously, as if she thought he’d flee like a wild creature, she brushed cheeks with him. “Goodbye, my dear. I’ll tell you what I find as soon as I can.”

\---

Charles awoke to pastel light and gentle music. He sat up slowly, reaching for his sword. 

It was gone. His armour and boots too, and even the leather band around his wrist with his name etched on the inside, which he’d made in case he was killed and his face should be left unrecognisable after a battle. His hands, when he looked down at them, were clean and the nails trimmed neatly. He touched his chest and found a sleeveless tunic, a very pale blue, in the finest cloth he had ever encountered – not wool, nor fibrous flaxcloth, and it definitely didn’t feel like even the finest slink leather. It shimmered like water when he pinched curiously at it.

The room was circular, with a domed ceiling painted in a complex floral design that fitted snugly into the curved beams. There were four windows surrounding Charles, and a fifth directly above the head of the bed – from where he lay he could see only sunny sky. Rhe room was warm despite the lack of a hearth but the wispy, stretched clouds outside looked strange and cold.

Charles flicked back the white blankets of the bed and swung his feet over the edge. He bit back a cry and curved forward over his legs. The calf of his bad leg was wrapped from knee to ankle in white bandages. He touched it gingerly and felt the heat and swelling of inflammation. He needed to watch for fever, perhaps whoever had taken him in had some herbs that might help-

He remembered the last few moments of the battle. The red eagle, the flickering figure that had seemed to be both inside its feathers and also one with them. A god – and not just any, for the eagle was an emblem of Shaw himself, king of the gods. 

Charles pushed himself to his feet despite the pain of his wound and hobbled to the window, grasping the sill to take the weight off his leg. He gazed out onto a sea of clouds, from which snowy, crag-strewn slopes seemed to emerge like behemoths surfacing to breath above the ocean. His lungs didn’t seem to inflate enough. He couldn’t breath. 

Charles felt the blood drain from his head and he knelt on his good leg, still clinging to the windowsill with one hand. His head hung low as he retched, half in terror and half with vertigo from the sight outside. He was on the Mount of the Conclave. It was more than he could even conceive, and he struggled to cling to conscious thought. 

He heard soft footsteps and looked up to two figures standing in the doorway, one male and the other a small woman carrying a cup. His vision swooped and he cringed away as they approached. Strong hands grasped his arms and led him back to the bed. 

“Drink, little man,” the woman’s voice came, her hand on the back of his head to guide him to the gold cup. “It is ambrosia. It will restore your body and protect you from this house, where mortals should not be.”

Charles drunk. The liquid was like a thin syrup, and tasted of fire, clear honey and herbs. He choked and spat a mouthful back into the cup, his mouth stinging, but the woman held his head in place until he drank again. He could feel the nectar fill his stomach and then wash through his veins. It was as if his body was being infused with the sparks of a dying inferno. 

When the vessel was empty the woman released him and he slid back onto the pillows, dazed and unable to focus. His injured calf began to itch tremendously and he groaned, rolling onto his side, his leg jerking. The skin all over his body burned.

“Don’t worry,” she soothed. “Your second cup will taste like the sweetest juice, and you will love it after that.”

Cool fingers took his leg and unwrapped the bandage, massaging the place where the wound had been. Charles knew, without having to look, that it had closed and the skin grown over it without a scar. The drink had healed him. He shut his eyes and buried his face in the pillow as the rush of the ambrosia hit its peak, dancing from his skin into his skull, rushing at the back of his eyeballs. At last, like a cramp, it began to subside and he slowly relaxed.

When he raised his head again, the woman was gone; the cup she’d brought sat on a gold tripod beside the bed. Standing over Charles was a tall, beardless man with pale eyes and a thin mouth. His robe was a deep crimson. Charles watched him for several seconds before the stranger reached out and ran his fingers down that side of Charles’ face. It was not a caress, but rather as if he were examining the workmanship of a newly-made statue. His lips curved into an inscrutable smile.

“Where did she go?” Charles asked, looking at the cup. The sting and fever of the ambrosia had completely faded now, and a welling strength filled him.

“Her chapter is finished. The cup is yours now,” the man replied. No, not a man – he was the face inside the eagle. Shaw. Charles felt his chest tighten.

“Hush now, don’t be afraid,” Shaw’s cool hand took hold of his shoulder. “You need never fear again. Come, walk with me.” 

The room turned out to be a small pavilion at the edge of a huge, many-tiered garden. The grounds were filled with sprawling vines and flowers of more shapes and colours than Charles had imagined existed in the world. Gnarled, low-branched trees with trunks as wide as the arm span of ten men twisted their thick roots over the worn stone walls and out into the abyss at the edge of the garden – there was no obstacle between them and the gaping cliff beneath the mountaintop. Birds, never larger than doves but some as small as bumblebees, filled the air with music that was too impossibly orchestrated to be natural. Charles’ bare feet soaked up the warmth of the tiled path. 

“Why did you bring me here?” he asked.

Shaw’s arm curled around his shoulder as they walked. He had tossed the train of his robe over his other elbow. It was a very fashionable cut, the sort of thing the best tailors in the city would have provided at great expense. Apparently the gods paid attention to fashion, then. Perhaps, Charles thought, they even visited tailors while in disguise. They surely didn’t make their own clothing.

“You have been to my liking for a long time, Charles, and I watched you on occasion. It was not until I saw that you had grown into your armour that I decided I must have you. You will serve us at feasting and make sure the ambrosia cups are always full. You are immortal now, like us, and will not want for anything.”

“Immortal,” Charles echoed glumly. “How easy it was.”

Shaw laughed, a low and predatory noise. “Quite. That is why you must gather the ambrosia yourself, and keep track of every drop. Logan, who tends and feeds the ambrosia garden, will show you how to collect it.”

His hand tightened around Charles’ shoulder and directed him into a bay where two tiers of the garden met. The sloped walls of the alcove were shallow and covered in creepers, dotted with tiny blue flowers. 

A milky purple-blue. Not the cobalt grey of Erik’s eyes. 

Charles wished he had died in that battle.

As he was staring at the flowers, his head feeling full of wine and fog, Shaw’s arms slipped around his waist, pulling Charles’ back into contact with the god’s chest. Charles’ whole body tensed, unable to reconcile the frenzy of religious terror and glory battling within him. This was a god, the mightiest off all gods, and Charles could feel his arousal against his buttock just as hot and hard as any man’s. He could hear the lust in a huff of breath in his ear as Shaw bent to brush his lower lip against the corner where Charles’ neck met his shoulder. Hungry fingers cupped Charles’ cock through the sleek fabric of the strange tunic.

Charles was dizzy with the unreality of it. This was a dream. He’d never woken up, he was in a fever on his boat, he’d hit his head and gone mad, anything, anything to explain how sharply _true_ were this garden and the groping god. 

“My lord,” Charles grabbed for Shaw’s wrist, his mind suddenly awash with the need to charm his way out of this. He could charm his way out of anything, couldn’t he? “I’m not worthy. I’m sordid, I’ve been had by so many before you…”

“Wonderful,” Shaw hummed into his skin, his hand beginning to massage Charles’ cock as if he couldn’t even feel Charles trying to pry his wrist away. “Then I shall not need to teach you from scratch.”

“I have a wife waiting for me at home, and a beloved man,” Charles tried to drive back his body’s response of _yesyesyesmore_. “Will you let me return to them soon? When I’ve served you as best I can?”

“Mere insects,” Shaw’s fingers crept up to the collar of the tunic and with one violent drag, ripped one shoulder open so that he could pinch at a nipple. “I am the only lover you will ever want again. Forever.”

Charles found himself pushed down into the garden, his knees and elbows crushing the milky-blue flowers, his fingers digging deep and finding black soil beneath the leaves. Even the dirt was beautiful, rich and fragrant. 

“How I wanted to take you in that bed, while you slept so beautifully,” Shaw’s voice was ragged now, heaving breaths and fumbling to shove the skirt of the tunic up over Charles’ hips. “But before the ambrosia… unwise. You might have been…” and without preparation or warning the god was inside him, and Charles’ mouth opened and only two years of war and the memories of men split navel to throat and their ribs broken open to reveal steaming hearts still heating, ah, only the training of battle kept a scream from flooding out his mouth. “…damaged,” finished Shaw in a grunt.

The hand was pumping slowly on his cock, in time with the god’s thrusts, but Charles could scarcely even feel it.

Charles thought, _Gods help me_ , and a laugh that he barely managed to silence bubbled up in him. And then he thought, _Charm him. Do it. Do it now you stupid, once-mortal fool, because this is forever._

Tears pouring down his face, out of sight of the god behind him, Charles mimicked all the noises he practised when he’d seduced someone who turned out to be uncomfortably inexperienced or just thought themselves better in bed than they actually were. He pushed back against Shaw and moved with him, and forced his thoughts into his straining member and nothing else. 

_I’m sorry,_ Charles prayed to Moira and Erik, to his mortals. _I’m sorry I’m not coming home._

The ambrosia ignited in his veins and he could feel it transforming him, creeping through his flesh and turning his earthen body to gold, his muscles to bronze and his nerves to pulses of starlight. Because this was forever, and if he didn’t learn – or at least pretend to enjoy it – well, either way he was divinely fucked.


	3. in which charles smiles and erik meets a nymph

"Good morning, O Radiant One," Charles smiled, tipping his head at Frost.

As always, the Goddess was like a statue come to life, her white gown spotless and her hair hanging in whorls as if every stand had been precisely composed by a master of the aesthetic. The effect was only spoiled by her beautiful face, which wore an expression of supreme dislike.

"If you call me that one more time, I shall have my husband beat you," she scowled. They both knew that no one told Shaw what to do, but Charles was also aware that Frost had as much skill in the art of manipulation as he'd possessed back among mortals, and the vindictiveness to use it if she saw fit. 

"But you _are_ radiant, my queen," Charles insisted, It was true; in the sunlight, Frost had a superhuman glow about her, like the flesh below her skin was composed of clear jewels. "Should I keep all observations about your person to myself in future?"

"You should keep your impertinent pretences of respect to yourself," she replied. "If I want worship I will look to my worshippers."

"Then Goddess, if it would make me any more tolerable to your sight, I'd be happy to visit your bed this evening."

"As if I would lower myself to taking scraps from others’ tables. You are here to bring me my cup and fuck my husband, nothing else."

"And I shall commence my primary duty forthwith," Charles bowed low, taking a step backwards. He'd been heading in the direction of the ambrosia garden, but he couldn't resist, "Would you like me to bring your cup once I've finished?" 

\---

Erik sat alone in a forest far from his city – he had not realised he thought of it as _his_ city until he left it for the first time in so many years – and far from the road which had brought him here. The trees whispered, but the air was warm and laden with the scents of new growth and soil. At the edge of Erik’s toes, the mossy ground plunged a few feet into a deep, clear stream that wound between massive boulders and pocket-sized beaches of grey silt.

He took in a breath. The forest had seemed frightening at first. He’d never wandered off a well-worn path before in his life, never even been out of sight of a farm or beyond the chimes of cattle bells. Even his few trips beyond the city walls had been brief and businesslike, to show his wares to merchants who wanted to make regular trade from neighbouring towns.

Perhaps he had gone mad to venture out now. It certainly hadn’t taken long for his sensible fear of the forest to turn into a strange, slow-spreading sense of adoration. It was so quiet it engulfed him, blotting out all his worries and fears. He had never felt so rested before. 

The sun was just turning the leaves from gold to a fiery orange. Erik dug into his satchel and found the wrapped wind-chime he had made out of scraps of thin brass. He held it in his fist to muffle it, tied the long leather string he'd brought to the top and then lowered it into the stream. Sitting as close to the edge of the deep bank as he dared, he watched the wind chime buffeted back and forth by the current, and waited. 

\---

Charles was singing a drinking song while he collected the nectar of the ambrosia garden – a repetitive, bouncy tune about heroics and war. He had so many memories shackled to the song that they blurred together, faces and taverns flowing through his head like a libation. Singing almost made him forget that he would never get a chance to renew those memories.

If he had known he was not alone he wouldn’t have been singing aloud, of course, so when a gruff voice snapped, “Some of us are trying to sleep, bub,” he jumped so hard he almost spilled the ambrosia.

Logan, god of health and feasting, was draped under one of the twisted rhododendrons that shielded the ambrosia bed from the rest of the garden. The hollow in the rhododendron’s roots cradled him like a hammock, worn to the shape of his stout body after centuries – or longer – of use. His eternally-stubbled chin rested on his chest and his eyes were closed, but his arms were not relaxed enough for him to be truly rising from a nap. 

“My apologies. I’m almost done, I’ll leave you to your rest soon,” Charles tipped a quick two-finger salute to the god. Of all the inhabitants of the Mount, he had yet to find the courage to ever give Logan cheek. The god of feasting was, ironically, rarely seen feasting or even talking to the other gods. The rest of the gods had all reacted in their own way to the new cupbearer – Angel boisterously glad of new company, Frost snidely spurning him, Riptide curiously testing him at every opportunity while Azazel often cornered him for intense discussions on mortal society. But Logan was completely indifferent to Charles’ arrival, treating him as if he had always been here. 

“Too late,” Logan stretched out his thick limbs and shambled to his feet. “They need feeding anyway.”

Charles stepped out of the ambrosia bed and crouched under the shade of a younger rhododendron, keeping the amphora steady in his arms. He watched as Logan took the silver knife from his belt and walked through the tall, thin-leafed flowers. Without so much as a twitch of his mouth, he dug the tip of the knife into the flesh inside his elbow and dragged it almost to his wrist. He pried the edges of the wound apart with the knife as if wedging apart a melon, briefly exposing the pale threads of nerves and thick ligaments before blood gushed into the trough and overflowed, running in stripes around his forearm. Logan held his wrist over the soil as he meandered through the garden. Though his path seemed aimless, none of the ambrosia plants missed out on the blood seeping into the soil.

Charles knew the wound would be gone in minutes – of all the gods, Logan’s immortal body seemed to restore itself the fastest, which perhaps made sense for a god of health and healing. But he still shivered, hugging the amphora to his chest. No matter how many times he watched this ritual, the rawness of it, the simple reminder that blood sacrifice was the basis of all their religion, shocked him every time like ice against his skin.

“What would happen if you didn’t feed them?” he asked, a little tentatively. He hadn’t dared question Logan about the ritual before now. “Would they die?”

“Oh, they’d do fine,” Logan stroked a petal between thumb and forefinger. He used one of the ambrosia plant’s leaves to clean his knife. “But the nectar would be nought but a sweetener for your wine. No divine properties.”

“Would Shaw’s or Frost’s blood work? Would mine?”

“Doubtful. The flowers crave the blood of an old god.”

Charles raised his head to look at Logan’s face. It was sullen and unreadable as ever. “What do you mean, ‘old god’? Like one of the titans? Are you – are you older than the others of the conclave?”

For just a moment, he thought he was going to get an answer. But then Logan closed his mouth and grunted out the corner, heading back to his niche under the tree. “You flap your lips too much. Go on, let me finish my nap.”

\---

Erik and Moira had spent many days searching for a way for him to ascend the Mount. They had gone to esteemed oracles and back-alley soothsayers, asked for help from atheist philosophers and even some of Charles' friends in the navy (without disclosing their blasphemous plan in full, of course). It was Moira who had eventually made the current breakthrough, after she procured a social call with Charles' stepfather.

Before Charles' mother had died, the family had often gone to visit a cousin who owned an olive farm. The nearby town was known for its proximity to a wild and dangerous forest where travellers often vanished. After a few drinks and subtle prodding, Marko suddenly began to confess how Charles had always had a propensity to attract supernatural attention. In the town near the olive grove, there was an old wives' tale that girls who had shamed themselves out of wedlock could become nymphs if they placed a wind chime in the local river and waited to be carried away. Marko, admitting drunkenly that he had hoped the nymphs would fall for his beautiful stepson and remove him from Marko's life, allowed Charles to venture into the forest to test the legend with a wind chime of his own. After several hours, long after the sun had set, during which his mother began to panic and all the slaves on the farm were sent out with torches to search for him, the boy returned without a scratch on his skin. His mother slapped him for making her worry, but he never said what had kept him. However, Marko reported that he often slipped into the forest after this.

It all fitted with Charles' story about befriending a nymph, boasted to Erik all these years later. Charles was rarely an outright liar, especially without good reason, so Moira had found surveying maps of the surrounding countryside and tracked down the most likely stream that Charles would have visited as a boy. Though the maps did not extend into the surrounding forest, it would be easy to follow the creek's path into the uncharted depths.

"And if I do find this creature, or creatures, what if I'm turned into a tree?" Erik asked, as they sat in his workshop on one of Moira's illicit visits. 

"Then I'll come find you and ask them to turn you back," Moira replied. "You'll be easy to find - an Aleppo pine in the midst of the cork forest."

"An Aleppo pine?"

"Oh yes. Surprisingly tolerant of the heat, so often standing alone," her eyes glinted. "And oddly enough, crucial for the flavour of good wine."

"I see," Erik smiled into his cup. "Then I'll expect to see a cypress growing next to me soon enough. Elegant and mostly ornamental, but impossible for the wind to sway."

Moira laughed. For just a moment, Erik imagined what it would have been like – if Charles had never vanished, if he had come home and married this strange, sharp-tongued woman and the three of them had lived together. As friends, maybe as bedmates (Erik wasn’t sure how conservative Moira was or if he even enjoyed women very much). There would have been children, of course. Charles’ and Moira’s; any children of Erik would have been bastards, ineligible for citizenship because of his foreign blood – but Erik would have loved them as much as if they’d been his own. Maybe more, because they were Charles’. Maybe he didn’t hate Moira after all. Maybe it would have worked. Maybe. 

He stared into his empty wine cup and his heart ached.

A few days later, Erik had made the chimes and the packed and unpacked and repacked his small satchel until he was satisfied. Moira had wrapped his sword in her shawl and given him a sack of pickled fish, dried figs and oatcakes. It might last weeks if he was careful with rations. Maybe it would take weeks. Maybe it would be years; they acknowledged this and made a vow together in front of a shrine of Angel. Neither of them would take another lover until they died or Charles came home. Moira kissed Erik’s forehead, he put her gold and ruby necklace around his neck, under his tunic where it couldn’t be seen, and then they parted.

\---

The jewel-studded cup that belonged to the king of the conclave was full. Charles carried it up the winding paths, cutting through the myrrhina bushes that encircled Shaw’s pavilion in the shapes of sacred symbols. They seemed to grow naturally that way – there were no gardeners to tend them, not that Charles had ever seen. 

The king’s pavilion was not the largest on the Mount (on the lower tiers there were feasting halls and copies of the great temples on earth), but it was the largest of the personal buildings that each of the gods occupied. There were no doors, only a roof supported by marble archways sculpted into shapes of human and animal forms, entwined in battle or coitus (it seemed to change depending on the light). Though veils could hang to close the interior of the pavilion from sight, they were almost always pinned back during the day. From every angle, the garden could be seen spreading out to the horizon. The god had no care for privacy.

Shaw liked to be the centre of attention. It was something he and Charles had in common.

“My lord,” Charles cleared his throat as he waited on the threshold. 

Shaw lay stretched on top of the sheets of the enormous, low bed in the centre of the pavilion. His eyes were closed and his perfectly formed limbs spread haphazardly around him, but Charles was not convinced he ever truly slept. 

“Come,” Shaw commanded in a soft voice.

Charles crossed the floor and put the cup down on the tripod beside the bed. It was shaped like one of the long-gone titans balancing the tabletop on his shoulders – a hugely extended phallus formed the third leg. Shaw would crave the ambrosia soon enough, as he had spent the last two days on the great mountain ranges of the east, soaking up lightning. He had not had to go as far as he often did to chase the lightning that gave him his strength and also his unstoppable weaponry; there was a heavy storm coming. Primed to the brim with the storm’s energy, Shaw would be thirsty and hungry – but his lust always had to be sated first.

Shaw’s desires were inexhaustible, matched only by Charles’ imagination. Charles had no pretences; sex with a god was _spectacular_. Sometimes injurious and fatal too, yes, but being immortal helped in that regard – by the next morning Charles was always recovered and ready to begin his duties anew. And it was not the routine, almost automatic fucking of slaves and whores by dullard mortals like Marko. Shaw’s libido constantly drove them to new and more outlandish methods of lovemaking.

Sex in the shape of an eagle a thousand feet above the valley. Sex at the bottom of the great lake. Sex, while invisible, on the alter of Shaw’s temple during the most holy festival of the year (Charles had snuck a look at the crowd whenever possible, but saw no one he knew). Sometimes Shaw wanted to play rough and draw blood and a humiliated blush from Charles. Sometimes he wanted to pleasure Charles, without any reciprocation, for hours on end, coaxing him to climax again and again with his lips, or instructing him to lie still with his eyes closed and then making him come with just his fingers buried and brushing deep inside him. In almost five months of life on the Mount, the only predictable thing about Shaw’s demands was their unpredictability.

But Charles was a quick study. 

“My dear wife tells me you propositioned her this morning,” Shaw mumbled, as Charles settled himself at the end of the bed, massaging the god’s nearest foot. 

“I only want to serve as best I can,” Charles replied innocently.

“Have we drawn that boundary? I don’t remember. Let me draw it now. You’re mine alone,” Shaw raised his head at last, propping his hands underneath it. “Remember it, since you are acting as such a rake.”

“You knew what I was when you kidnapped me,” Charles made his way up the god’s legs, admiring the chiselled musculature beneath brown, lightly-haired skin. “If you wanted a devotee, you should have taken a priest.”

“Ah. I couldn’t stand the droning prayers,” Shaw gave a deep rumble as Charles took him into his mouth. One thing Charles appreciated was that Shaw never skimped in vocalising his appreciation of Charles’ work. “Or the arrogance a priest would display in being chosen- ah, ah yes… “

Long fingers stroked the back of Charles’ head and then dug sharp into his hair, twisting it tight in the god’s grasp. His hips began to jerk, his hand pushing down, fucking so deep and mercilessly that Charles could barely get enough breath even through his nose. So this morning would be rough. Well, he’d brace his elbows as best he could and let Shaw dictate the pace.

People always noted beauty as Charles’ leading virtue, but they often overlooked his most useful: unwavering optimism. 

\---

Erik sat in front of the stream wondering what to do if their only plan led nowhere. His mind was drifting when he heard the splash. It jarred against the splutter and dribble of the stream’s rhythm. He sat up and looked down into the ravine.

For a moment he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The chimes shifted under the flow just as they had before. But he found he couldn’t see them as easily, as if the water was deeper than before – or thicker, somehow, though no less clear. 

Then his eyes found that the thickness of the water was moving like a wake – but no, it was shaped like a person, wide-hipped and elegant. In the strange texture he could see round-tipped fingers and a shifting halo of colourless, crystal locks of hair. 

And then the creature’s head twisted up and saw him.

The air in Erik’s chest was tar and his tendons seized into stone. Opaque yellow orbs stared at him, and what had looked sweet and elegant a moment ago was suddenly a wild predator on guard as the nymph was rose to the surface. She climbed as fast as a spider up onto a boulder that had fallen from the far bank. As the water streamed off her body it took her near-invisibility with it, and she was blue as twilight and scaled like a fish, her lips drawn back to display sharp needles of teeth as she hunched down like a pouncing lion.

Erik remembered that no one who ventured deep into the forest ever came back.

“Wait!” he raised his hand, his voice shaking. “I’m with Charles!”

The nymph’s yellow eyes narrowed, and she spoke in a voice that hummed like a lyre-string. “Oh yes? But I don’t see him here.”

The last word was a cry, and she leapt the entire breadth of the stream and knocked Erik back with such force his head thumped against the leaf-litter and he saw double. He gasped and writhed, but the nymph was crouched on his chest, light as a child. Her hands pinned his arms down with the strength of a bullock. Her sharp teeth smiled a few inches from his eye, and a smooth pink tongue darted out to slowly lick her lower lip. 

“Raven!” Erik gasped. “Are you Raven?”

The tongue and the smiled disappeared. The hands gripping his elbows tightened. “He told you about me?”

“Only a little,” Erik wheezed. It was rather hard to breath with a nymph, however light, squatting on top of your ribs. “He was taken from me. I need him back.”

“By who?” Raven snarled, a low hiss rising in her throat.

“By the Gods,” Erik strained against her, but she was inhumanly strong. “By Shaw.”

The hungry, animal expression in Raven’s face shifted. She looked almost human now – a troubled young girl. With a vicious shove she ground his arms against the rough earth and then let go, standing up in a blink. Erik coughed, rolling onto his side and gasping for air. “Thanks-”

“Don’t look on me, mortal,” Raven snapped. It occurred to Erik that he could see every part of her very feminine body. He closed his eyes quickly and crawled to his knees. When he looked up again, where Raven had been standing there was only a clean-skinned maiden in a yellow robe, her white-gold hair hanging free across her shoulders.

“So it’s true,” the shape-changed said, her voice silky and human now. “We heard Shaw had a new cupbearer. The most beautiful youth in the world, the story went. I haven’t seen little Charles for years, but – I wondered.”

“He’s not little any more,” Erik snapped back. “He’s a man and a soldier. Shaw had no right to steal-”

Raven cut him off with a bitter laugh. “Right is what the gods _make_ right be.”

“I came to ask for your help,” Erik got to his feet, brushing leaves off his clothes. “I’m going to climb the Mount to reclaim him.”

The look of shock on her face was worth getting his chest stomped on. She shook her head. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I do. I’ll risk anything.”

“Because you have no idea what you’re risking!”

He straightened his back. “Will you help me, or will you not? That’s all I need to know.”

She bit her lip and said finally, “There’s someone who might be of interest. Someone who met Charles in the last year he visited these woods, when he was almost grown but not yet getting… distracted,” she pouted at him enviously.

“Another nymph?”

“No. But neither a man. A friend of mine – Hank of the northern hills.” 

\---

The top of the mountain was enveloped in a wild snowstorm. It had been going on for days. Charles could hear the wind screaming, on and on, occasionally pausing as if for breath. The snow was so thick that if you had stepped beyond the garden, you would not have been able to see your hand stretched in front of you. You would not have been able to feel it, either, because the cold would have begun to freeze your skin right off the bones.

Inside the garden, however, only one in a hundred snowflakes made it through the invisible and untouchable barrier between the home of the gods and the outside world. They drifted down through the air as harmless as petals and melted as soon as they touched down. The temperature was only a little chillier than usual, so Charles walked briskly between the pavilions rather than bothering to put on a cloak. The birds were mostly quiet, huddled in the crooks of the trees' arms with their feathers puffed out. Charles found one thumb-sized finch lying on the path, its legs stiff and eyes crusted over.

He lifted it in his palm. It was the first dead animal he had seen since his abduction. It seemed wrong, somehow, to bury it in this unnaturally fertile soil - as if it would rot and crumble to dust and within moments become an ingredient of the flowers' impossibly lurid colours. He crossed the soft grass, consciously not uttering a prayer to the centaurs, the collective guardians of beasts and the hunt. After all, as the personal servant of the Conclave he now technically outranked them on the hierarchy of gods. 

He still wasn't used to that. 

He threw the bird out over the edge of the garden, its tiny form vanishing instantly into the raging storm. Not for the first time, he thought about throwing himself off that unguarded edge. How long would he fall before his body hit the snow or an outcrop of the cliff? His consciousness would be snuffed out instantly, his body frozen in minutes, and if left undisturbed he might sleep there for years, for millenia, unaware of any passage of time... but Shaw would find him long before then, and would have _questions_. When it wasn’t of his own deliberate effort, Shaw was disturbed by any sign of upset from Charles. If he knew about these morose stupors that Charles fell into, the god would try to _fix him_ , to get inside his head to scrape the sadness out of him. And Charles had no intention of letting the God know anything about his true thoughts.

Somewhere deep in those thoughts, Erik was buried. It was the only way he could keep Erik pristine in his memory, by never, ever bringing him into his conscious mind. The moment Charles let himself think about Erik and Moira, that was the moment the creeping melancholy began to take root, and why torture himself? He could never leave. He could never see them again. So he kept those memories preserved in his most secret compartments. As if Erik was sleeping in long after the sun had risen, and Charles would rather simply sit across the room and let him rest, watching from a distance, than trouble him by waking him.


	4. triumph

On the lowest level of the garden sat the temples; it wasn’t until the fifth month that Charles learned there was one for him, too. No one had told him – Angel tossed her head when he acted surprised and laughed, “Well _obviously_ , chickie. You’re an immortal now. People can’t _help_ but ask you for favours.”

“I don’t understand. I can’t – I mean, I haven’t the power to help them, the way you do. I can’t even leave the garden,” Charles frowned.

“The temples aren’t for them,” Azazel explained impatiently. “They are for us. Other immortals cannot enter your temple, and you’ll find strength there, you’ll see. It’s what ambrosia does to you – one dose robs you of death, but as long as you drink from the cup, prayer and sacrifices give us power.”

Charles found it tucked down beside the oak-lined pergola at the edge of the west cliff. A pair of rough-hewn steps led to its door – as usual, Charles wondered who it was that built and tended the garden and its features, but when he’d asked Logan a few days ealier the god had simply said, “The garden takes care of itself.”

His temple was small and square, standing in the shade of a wayward oak and made of a reddish stone with terracotta reliefs. The sculptures were little figures of dancers, eagles and _kylix_ drinking cups. He wasn’t sure it was truly his until he stepped inside and then he _knew_. It was just a tiny room with an empty altar, but it felt right. It felt like it was saying his name.

For the first time since he’d arrived, he thought he had truly gained something in this new life. He was not just a pampered prisoner, not just a slave – he felt the temple resonate with love and hope. From strangers, yes, but it fed him. He was a god, or would be, if things worked the way Logan hinted, if gods could be made and could die as Charles suspected – he had been given a chance, and he was patient and clever and ambitious and there was no reason why one day this whole garden, this whole world, could not be _his_ -

Charles gasped and fell to his hands and knees, gagging and squeezing his eyes shut. The temple’s comforting hum drew back, as alive and aware of him as a well-trained hound. He shook his head. “Not your fault,” he croaked. The temple was right. He was ambitious and he was clever. But most of him still felt human, and he wouldn’t yet trade that to become Shaw. 

He breathed deep until he felt a little steadier. Beneath him, he saw at last the square tiles of the floor. They were no larger than coins, enamelled in jewel-like colours and each carved with a simple line drawing of an animal. There was no mortar to hold the tiles in place; they fitted together so snugly he couldn’t feel any movement when he shifted his weight. But when he touched one, he found he could pry it out easily – the crude scrawl of a bull stared up at him – and when he held it, he felt the prayer behind it, a father asking for his wayward, gambling son to find purpose in his life.

As he put the bull back, and saw that there were more tiles beneath the top layer. They must sink down into the earth beneath the temple as new sacrifices appeared. 

He spent the rest of the afternoon reading the prayers. Girls looking for powerful husbands, young men asking for their lovers to be loyal, mothers praying for Charles to protect their sons in battle. Sometimes he heard their voices, or saw their names glimmer across the lacquer of the tile, or knew that they came from this city or that port. And then he picked up a little image of a dove and –

Moira. This prayer was from Moira. 

He could hear her voice in her ears, almost see her standing above the altar in her father’s portico. But her prayer did not ask for favour, only saying one thing: _“Erik is coming for you.”_

He dropped the tile and shoved himself backwards, blood pounding and breath coming in shallow pants.

No.

No. 

Charles had to stop him.

\---

They had been walking for hours. Erik’s limbs were trembling and he was beginning to stumble on every dip in the mossy ground or outcrop of tree roots. It was hard enough walking behind the nymph. He was pretty sure her feet weren’t even touching the ground and the tree branches parted in front of her, while Erik had to slog through trying to find solid places to step without getting flicked in the face by too many twigs.

He knew he was going to fall flat on his face if he didn’t stop soon. “Excuse me,” he croaked. The nymph was some way ahead and didn’t look back. He called a little louder, “Raven, wait.”

By the time she’d turned around he’d managed a controlled collapse onto a dead tree-trunk. He took off one sandal and massaged his foot, wincing at the sight of an inch-wide blister between two toes. That was going to be agony as soon as it burst. The muscles of his leg were shivering with fatigue, but he gritted his teeth and put his sandal back on.

“We’re very close,” Raven said. He was surprised to hear a note of sympathy in her voice. 

“I just need,” Erik panted, “a drink,” he dug into his satchel to find the small water-skin he’d brought. It only had a few mouthfuls left – Raven had not stopped at any of the creeks they’d crossed on their way, and he hadn’t dared demand a rest until now.

She watched him as he drained the skin and put it back into his bag. “You’re just a man,” she said quietly. “You really want to face him? A god?”

“You mean Charles, or Shaw?”

“I mean Shaw.”

Erik rubbed salt from his own sweat out of his eyes, but succeeded only in making them sting worse than ever. “Without question, yes.”

“Come on. It’s not much further.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. Less than ten minutes later they were standing on the edge of a wide, clear pool filled by the torrent of a waterfall crashing over a jumble of boulders. Erik fell to his knees, threw his satchel aside and cupped his hand to drink straight from the pool. It was all he could do not to fall face-first into it to cool his aching body.

“Hank!” Raven called, her voice ringing through the forest like bells. A cluster of yellow-throated birds feeding on a bush nearby did not even flinch. She waited less than a minute before following it with, “ _Hank, you better not be ignoring me!_ ”

Erik raised his head to the sound of heavy hooves drawing closer. A horse’s hooves, not a stag’s, he was sure – but who could possibly ride through this thick foliage? He scooted back from the edge of the pool, his muscles groaning in complaint as he tensed into a crouch.

The creature burst out of the undergrowth so suddenly that even the yellow-throated birds scattered, cheeping wildly. It thundered around the lip of the pool and slammed to a halt on a rise above Erik and Raven. A man’s torso, arms and head loomed over them, rough fists held a little away from his body, face shadowed by the setting sun that shone behind his broad shoulders. But from the waist down, his body flowed smoothly into that of a huge stallion, one front hoof the size of a tureen pawing at the grass, flank twitching with strength.

Erik heard himself give a truncated cry, and he dived for his satchel, fumbling for the ties. Moira’s shawl slid off and landed half in the water as he pulled out his sword and spun, holding it aloft with both hands, the tip pointed at the beast’s face.

The creature reared up on its hind legs, giving a bellow of anger.

“Erik!” Raven splashed through the pool to grab Erik’s wrists. “Stop! Stop, this is who I brought you to meet!” 

“He’s a centaur!” Erik wheezed, his heart thudding so loudly it dizzied him. “They’re savage murderers and rapists! He’s a monster!”

“Thanks Raven, you do keep the nicest company,” the creature huffed.

Erik gaped. It was back on four hooves again, shifting restlessly in place, and its voice had been very human. It actually sounded a little embarrassed. Erik could see its – could see _his_ \- face now, high-cheeked and with a prominent chin, and slim, piercing eyes. His dark hair, which melded into a mane down his back, was as neatly trimmed as Erik’s. 

“Erik,” Raven said firmly. “Put your sword down. Hank’s not a monster.”

Though his body didn’t seem to want to obey him, Erik slowly lowered the sword. He held Hank’s gaze, trying to repress the glare that he knew was emanating from every inch of his stance. 

“Are you seducing humans again?” Hank gave a contemptuous sniff in Raven’s direction. “You’re barbaric.”

“I haven’t seduced a human since I was a teenager!” Raven cried. “And _you_ can talk, mooning over philosophers like a love-sick maiden!”

“I do not _moon_! I admire!” Hank replied, giving an outraged whinny.

Erik wondered if he had gone mad. Perhaps he was still in his workshop, or in his bed, tied down to keep from hurting himself. The priests had probably been called to pray for the madness to leave his brain. 

Yes, this all seemed like a reasonable explanation, Erik thought as his vision tunnelled and he legs gave out. He dropped the sword on the stones and just managed to hold onto consciousness enough to catch himself as he fell. He heaved in a couple of deep breaths, focusing on the soft, damp moss under his hands. The giddiness began to pass.

“Erik?” 

He looked up to find Raven and Hank both bending over him. He tried to sit up and promptly slid sideways into the moss again. “I’m sorry, I’m so tired,” he panted. 

“Raven, what did you do to him?” Hank accused.

“I didn’t do anything, we just came straight here!”

“Mortals are _fragile_ , you need to take better care of them,” Hank said in a schoolteacher voice. “Come on, my hearth’s blazing, don’t let him lie here on the wet ground.”

Two pairs of hands seized Erik above the elbows and hauled him up, rather lop-sidedly as Hank bent down from his great height. 

Some time later, he found himself in front of a roaring fire set into a cavity inside the mouth of a high-roofed cave. His own cloak was wrapped around his shoulders, and a clay bowl of hot soup was in his hands. He sipped at it, watching the flames and feeling a rising sense of humiliation. Raven was right, wasn’t she? If he couldn’t even keep up with a nymph, if a centaur was calling him fragile, there was no way he could best the king of the gods. He’d thought somehow that if he only wanted it enough, if his intent was strong and pure enough, then it would simply happen. But he might as well have been an ant challenging a wrestler to combat. 

“I’m not going to give up,” he said to himself, tightening his hands around the cup. “I will not.”

Raven and Hank were silhouetted by the fading sun at the entrance to the cave, the latter sitting with his legs folded under him. They had been talking in quiet voices, but they both looked up as he spoke.

“You’re sure?” Hank asked. Erik didn’t think he’d spoken loud enough to be heard, but perhaps centaurs had particularly good ears. “There’s no shame in admitting it.”

“I’m sure,” Erik growled. He shuffled around to face them. “Raven seemed to think you can help. Do you know a way for me to ascend to the Mount of the Conclave?”

The daylight was bleeding away into dusk, and the faces of the two non-humans was illuminated by the light of the fire. Raven had returned to the blue scales and yellow eyes that she had first appeared with, though she was still wearing the robe that she had conjured out of thin air. She drained her own bowl of soup and licked her lips before she answered. “Hank is an inventor,” she said proudly. “Cleverer than any mortal.”

“Well, I don’t know about Daedalus-” Hank mumbled.

“Than any living mortal, anyway,” Raven insisted. “He builds all sorts of things, and he knows how to infuse them with magic, too. He’s been trying to build a machine that will fly like a bird.”

The centaur was actually blushing. Erik asked, “Does it work?”

“The design is sound, but too fragile once I increased the size to carry my weight,” Hank explained. “I’ve tried using lighter woods for the body and stronger, more durable woods for joins and dowels, but it won’t hold together. Ash, hickory, holywood, olive trunk – I even had a third-cousin bring me bamboo from very far away. Denser woods should do, but I can’t work them easily enough.”

“What about bronze?” Erik asked.

Hank shrugged. “I don’t know enough about metal. I’ve experimented, but I don’t think I have the right tools-”

“I can work metal,” Erik cut him off. He looked between the two wild creatures. “I’m a jeweller. If you can take me back to the nearest city, I’ll get you everything we’ll need.”

Hank and Raven looked at each other. Erik growled. “I’m serious. Show me your machine tomorrow, talk me through the obstacles and I’ll figure it out. And I’ll teach you.”

There was a hungry look on Hank’s face as the potential of this skill occurred to him. Raven laughed. “Perhaps you do have a god on your side after all, Erik.”

\---

Erik was standing at the edge of a lake, up to his ankles in the water. There was a purple and gold wind rippling through the sky and fish swimming lazily past his head, gulping the air with happy expressions on their faces. They looked a bit like his old master, actually. Erik smiled. He had something to do, but it was just a bangle, with lapis lazuli. For a funeral. It was all sort of nice.

And then Charles was standing on the lake in front of him and the fish darted away and the niceness was snapped back into the trees and Erik realised he was dreaming. Realised it far too lucidly. 

“Charles?” he whispered, reaching out one hand, but he found that Charles was much further away than he thought. He was standing on the surface of the water, in a pale blue chiton that gleamed like sweat-soaked skin. He looked sharper and smoother than Erik remembered, his muscles too defined, his freckles too ordered, his eyes too blue. Godlike. Unreal. What had they done to him?

“You have to go back,” Charles said. “You have to give me up. I’m begging you, Erik.”

“Of course you’d say that,” Erik growled, wading deeper into the water. But he couldn’t swim and Charles was beyond his reach. The water lapping around his thighs was suddenly very cold. He stood shuddering and found tears on his cheeks. “I can do it, I promise, I swear to you. Don’t send me back.”

Charles walked across the lake’s surface, leaving perfect spreading circles of ripples instead of footsteps. When he reached Erik, still standing on top of the water while Erik was sunk into it, he crouched to hug Erik’s head to his chest. Erik breathed in, but Charles smelled of scoured greenery and incense. He put one hand around his waist and clutched Charles’ forearm with the other, digging his hand in as if he could tether him even beyond this dream-world. Erik felt as if he was being embraced by a cloth doll filled with sand. Charles was not real. This was not really happening. 

“My beloved, my home,” Charles whispered into his hair. “Do you think I don’t have faith in you? I do, that’s why I’m so afraid for you. You will die doing this, and you may die terribly. If you care about yourself so little, then think of how it will be for me, living for all eternity with that memory,” he was kissing Erik’s crown, muffling his words. “Don’t hurt me like that. Go back.”

Erik’s tears soaked into the strange, sleek material. Charles took a hold of his head and held him away for a moment, wiping Erik’s tears away with his thumbs, staring at him with a wry smile on his face.

“What?” Erik grizzled. “What are you doing?”

“Checking that you’re just as I remember,” Charles answered. He glanced over his shoulder. “I have to-”

Erik awoke, eyes opening slowly. He clenched his hand around his cloak. Rough wool etched with dust and salt. He could remember the feel of impossibly soft cloth in his hands, and the smell of incense. He could remember Charles saying, “Go back,” and his smile, the one he wore when he was doing his best not to laugh. 

He rolled over and stretched his back, wincing at the aches left behind by the forest floor. Without really knowing why, he fumbled for Moira’s necklace, still hanging low on his chest. The gold was warm in his palm and he could feel his own heart beating swiftly. He didn’t feel remotely sleepy. 

Hank and Raven sat a short distance away, the nymph curled up against her friend’s flank with one arm lying across his back. They weren’t sleeping – they seemed to sleep only a handful of hours a day. Hank was going over the tools that Erik had brought back, which he’d had been carrying in two saddlebags despite grumbling on the entire return trip about how he was being treated as a packhorse (yet he refused to let Erik carrying more than a light pack, on the grounds that Erik was already too slow). 

Raven looked over, her yellow eyes gleaming in the waning moonlight. It had been almost a full moon when Moira had first come to the workshop to join his sacrilegious conspiracy. Erik couldn’t believe it had been more than a month since that night. 

Raven’s voice purred in the darkness. “You look troubled.”

Erik tried to find a comfortable position to lie back in and failed. He husked, “I was dreaming of Charles.”

“What did you see?” she asked sharply.

“He told me to go home. I don’t remember much else.”

She made an ambiguous face. “You should pay attention to dreams.”

Erik felt again the softness of the chiton, saw Charles’ freckles, caught a flash of his voice, _Do you think I don’t have faith in you? I do_. 

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he grumbled, wriggling onto his side to go back to sleep. “It was just a dream.”

\---

Charles wondered if it would be to his advantage to stop breathing. After all, it wasn’t like it would hurt him in the long term. On the other hand, if Frost was going to catch him he’d like to see it coming.

“That’s odd,” the queen of the gods said. Charles could localise her from the direction of her voice, and silently began a litany of silent curses. She was standing right in front of the stone chair at the front of her room. 

It stood before a small window, the only one on that wall, which was – 

Shit. Shit. Which was usually covered by a muslin shroud. 

“The veil’s pinned back,” Frost said. Charles wasn’t sure who she was talking to yet. He didn’t dare raise his head above the lip of the bed, in case he was heard or her companion was looking in his direction.

The chair, unique in the garden, gave Frost the power to enter the dreams of mortals. The other gods used it when they wanted to convey particularly important signs to certain priests or kings, but Frost coveted its power zealously, and even Shaw had had to beg, bargain and threaten on the one occasion she had allowed him to use it while Charles had been around. Even if Charles had somehow convinced her to let him contact Erik, he was afraid to owe her that kind of favour. So he’d decided on more illicit means of procuring it. 

Once he knew Frost was away from her room, he’d settled himself on the chair and drawn back the veil over the looking-window. Instantly, it was like the living world had exploded inside his mind. So many people, so many more than he’d imagined! The philosophers always said the world was a globe, but he’d never thought it could be so _huge_ , or there could be so many strangers, so many people who looked and thought so differently. It had taken him some time to focus and seek out Erik, sleeping on the cold forest floor beside – how curious, beside his childhood friend the nymph, and a centaur he didn’t know. He’d meant to deliver his warning in only a few seconds and then flee without Frost being any the wiser. But when he’d seen Erik in the dream – after three years, after everything that had happened – he couldn’t. He had stupidly stayed, trying to touch Erik through the dream, trying to see his face properly through the blur of Erik’s self-image and the numbness of Charles’ projected body. Too late, he’d felt godly minds approaching the pavilion, had leapt off the chair and thrown himself behind the bed just as Frost arrived.

Her companion spoke up at last. “So you left it open. No doubt a few lucky worshippers had some particularly nice dreams while you were changing,” came the voice of Angel, standing in the doorway by the sound of it.

Angel. Well… it could be worse. It could have been pretty much anyone else.

“I never leave it open,” Frost said quietly. 

Charles thought now might really be the time to stop breathing. He thought he could actually feel Frost’s head turning like an owl’s, searching for whoever had snuck into her pavilion uninvited. What would she do to him if she caught him in here? Give him to Shaw? No, Shaw would laugh it off or give him nothing more than a token punishment. She would find her own way of getting back at him. She’d use it as a lever to control him. 

Charles had to consciously repress the urge to start a prayer, _please don’t let her find me_. Praying was the absolute worst thing he could do right now. Frost would hear that as loud as a howl and catch him instantly. 

“Riptide,” Angel said suddenly.

“What?”

“Riptide wanted to visit a mortal he’s been dallying with. She’s pregnant, you know how the men are, can’t dip their wick even once without mortal wombs swelling.”

“You must be mistaken. That’s got to be his fifth this decade.”

“Perhaps he’s hoping his descendents will best your husband’s out of sheer number. At any rate, Azazel was jealous and refused to transport him to visit her and ensure the child’s safety. He asked me if he could borrow my wings, as the winds would take a day or two to carry him there. I told him to go fuck himself. I bet he stole in here to tell her he would be late.”

Charles let out a very long, very quiet breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. He could practically hear Frost’s sneer of disdain. After a moment she sniffed. “How dare he. I shall not let him get away with this.”

“I’m sure you won’t,” by the sound of her voice, Angel had crossed the room to stand close to Frost. “But you can deal with him later. Right now, you promised you would deal with me.”

“Indeed I did,” Frost’s voice had dropped a full octave and was suddenly pulsing with a lust Charles had absolutely never heard from her. He listened as the two goddesses climbed onto the bed together, holding his hand over his mouth to keep from sniggering. Oh, if only he could let Frost know he knew about _this_ little affair, she’d never bother him again – but of course, she’d figure out his own liaison with the dream chair and they’d just end up more deeply bogged in their rivalry than ever. A pity. 

He waited until Angel’s cries were growing to a fever pitch and then crawled, staying as low to the floor as he could, around the bed to the door on the far side. He decided it would be rather impudent to look back at the two of them, so he kept his eyes to the front as he scuttled into the cloisters outside and then ran for it as fast as he could. 

\---

Time passed. Erik and Hank worked on the flying machine, turning Hank’s hearth into a makeshift forge. Frost cast narrow-eyed looks at Riptide whenever they were in the same room together. Charles went to his temple every day looking for more prayers from Moira, but found none. At one point he sat miserably for almost an hour, thinking of her growing old without a husband. She deserved better. She deserved sons and a library and to hold the ear of noble men. He wondered if Angel would let him borrow her wings, so he could visit her for a night – surely if Moira bore a child from him, he an immortal and her discontinued fiancé, no one would think less of her? He fantasised about Erik giving up his mad quest and going back to the _polis_ to help Moira raise Charles’ ambrosia-blooded son. 

He didn’t think Shaw would ever allow it, but it was a nice dream, until he realised he would have to watch any such son age and die like any mortal. He bent his head and sighed against his knees. He must stop thing about them. He must. He must. He must remember them only as they had been, eternally young and loving in his mind.

It was time to serve at the evening meal. He got up and went to find the amphora of ambrosia. 

Shaw was in a very pleasant mood that evening, and summoned Charles back to his pavilion as soon as the meal was over (Frost and Riptide were having a verbal sparring match; everyone excused themselves early to avoid being dragged into it). Charles was glad for the distraction from his gloomy thoughts, and threw his arms around the god’s neck to kiss him before they had even reached the bright bubble of lamplight inside Shaw’s bedroom. The garden was beautiful and smelled of winter berries, and Shaw heaved Charles up into his arms, carried him through the nearest arch and lowered him onto the bed. 

Charles wriggled backwards, his cheeks flushing with anticipation, grabbing at Shaw’s robe to pull the crimson fabric over his head. As Shaw followed him onto the bed, now completely exposed, he put his hand on Charles’ chest.

“Wait.”

“As you wish,” Charles smirked, settling back on his elbows. 

“I want to do something to brighten you,” Shaw thrummed the ‘r’ deep in his throat. “You’ve seemed troubled as of late.”

“Making me wait won’t help,” Charles raised his eyebrows and let his glance linger on the god’s erection. 

“Only a little longer,” Shaw whispered, leaning over him. “Tell me about your lover.”

“What lover?” said Charles, genuinely confused, because it wasn’t like he had a lot of options for infidelity when he couldn’t even leave the garden. Did Shaw think he’d taken up relations with a tree?

“The one you had before. You mentioned him when you first came here.”

Charles felt the blood leave his groin very quickly and jolt through the rest of his body in a cold flood. Had he mentioned Erik? Yes, perhaps he had – and Shaw had an inhumanly good memory. He said, as casually as he could, “Oh, him. He was some ex-slave. An artisan. But not that clever.”

“What was his name?” Shaw put one hand down beside Charles’ shoulder and leaned in to kiss his neck. Charles tried to focus only on the god, to drive out the sick astonishment at these questions, to run as far from he could from the feeling of betrayal at what he was saying.

“Erik.”

Shaw’s teeth teased marks into the skin of Charles’ throat. “I think I saw him once or twice, when I was watching you. What did he look like? What was his body like?”

“Tall. Fair and foreign,” Charles whispered. He could feel a lump forming in his throat and had to swallow to keep his voice clear. Shaw was teasing his earlobe with his tongue, fingers prying at the collar of Charles’ tunic to rip it open from throat to navel, which was always his favourite method of getting Charles undressed. “Skinnier than me. He didn’t – didn’t eat enough,” oh, please, let the god get bored of this.

“More.”

“Strong hands. Ash under his nails. Blue eyes, always scowling,” in desperation, Charles reached for Shaw’s cock, but the god knocked his hand away.

“Like this?” Shaw asked, leaning back. 

Erik’s face looked down at him, wearing a perfect mimicry of Erik’s gloomy frown. Erik’s hand caught hold of Charles’ wrist as he tried to jerk away. Except the hand was unmarred by old burns and calluses, and the body was flawless and athletic, and the eyes in Erik’s skull were a sharp, piercing blue like precious stones. 

“As lovely as you remember?” Erik asked, sitting up to take Charles’ captured hand and link the fingers of his other hand through it in a forced sham of mutual affection. 

“Not at all,” Charles said through gritted teeth. His ribcage shook with the throb of his heart. “He’s nothing to me now, my lord. I want to see you.”

“But it’ll be fun to play,” Erik curved in, and Charles pressed himself down into the bed, as far away from the illusion as he could get. Erik laughed, and even that was a well-made caricature. “Charles, my dear, I do believe I’ve finally found a carnal act that _shocks_ you. And here I thought you completely imperturbable.”

He caught Charles’ other wrist and pinned them both above Charles’ head. 

“I’m only bored by this game,” Charles said, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice, trying to resist the urge to knee Shaw in the groin and just run, run to the spring at the centre of the garden and scrub himself until he could flay the too-perfect face from his mind. 

“But your heart’s racing so,” Erik lowered his head to flick his tongue over Charles’ left nipple, and Charles felt the sting of bile crawling up from his stomach, “And your skin is flushing beautifully,” he kissed his way back up Charles’ throat, grinding his wrists down into the blankets. “I have not seen you so vulnerable for a long time, precious boy.”

“I’m only bored,” Charles croaked, a pointless lie now. 

And then Erik let him go and slipped off the bed, and for one heavenly moment Charles thought Shaw had given this game up. But hands seized his ankles and dragged him to the edge of the bed, and Erik was kissing his mouth like a blow that crushed Charles’ lips against his teeth, and Erik was slipping two fingers between his lips and telling Charles to suck. And he did, and Erik had gripped his hip with inhumanly strong fingers, and was opening him and pushing one of Charles’ leg up with the other hand and sliding inside, slow and languid, his eyes locked on Charles’ face. Charles wanted to lie still and detach himself from everything but his body recoiled of its own accord and tried to pull away. Erik held him in place and when Charles growled and tried to scratch his eyes Erik grabbed his wrists again.

“What did you call him?” he asked, standing over the edge of the bed and pulling Charles fully onto his cock. “’My love’? ‘Darling’? Call me what you called him.”

“Bastard,” Charles said through gritted teeth, turning his head away, and Erik just _laughed_ , like he honestly thought this was just part of the game. Maybe he did. Charles had never protested before.

 _I deserve this, I’ve played right into this, he was always going to find my breaking point,_ he thought, his mouth opening to his wretchedly dry throat, his cock lying limp on his stomach. Erik paid it no attention, grunting with each increasingly brutal thrust. 

“How large was he?” Erik panted. “How did he feel, inside you? Tell me, I want details.”

“Like a fucking stallion compared to your pitiful prick,” Charles sneered, and he shouldn’t have, because

“As you wish.”

then Erik was simply growing, and Charles bit down on his own tongue and thought, _don’t scream don’t screamdon’tscreamDON’T_ , but he was moving faster and harder and Charles’ throat made a small, stifled noise and at that sound Erik came at last, not quietly the way the real Erik did, but verbalising with groans and utterances of love and praise for Charles, “Dearest, wonderful, delightful-”

It was over. Please, please let it be over. _I’m sorry,_ Charles thought, not sure which of them he was apologising. He tried to think of Erik kissing him in the darkness of the workshop, but ugh, now he could see only the too-perfect copy dragging him closer, holding him down. He’d ruined everything. 

When Erik pulled out, he seized Charles’ shoulder and rolled him – not roughly, but carelessly – onto the marble floor, saying, “Careful, don’t get blood on my bed.” 

Charles landed on his side and did not let himself lie like fallen prey for more than a couple of seconds. He forced himself up onto one elbow, breathing through the pain and out the other side. His mouth was full of blood: he’d bitten his tongue almost clean through. When he trusted himself not to collapse, he put his hand up onto the bed and got to his feet. He went to the tripod-legged table, picked up Shaw’s cup and drained the last two mouthfuls from it. The ambrosia stung his brutalised tongue, but tasted of the sweetest liquor. The hot fire of it rushed through him and dulled the pain. In less than a minute he was healed, and trusted himself to look at Shaw without utter hatred on his face.

‘Erik’ was posing in front of a tall mirror that Shaw had conjured. “He is quite the specimen,” he said, pouting Erik’s lips. “I can definitely see the attraction. But you know, Charles, you could have had _anyone_. You must have been underselling yourself.”

Charles swallowed until he thought he might have regained his voice. It still came out in a rasp. “May I go?”

Erik turned to face him, and in a blink Shaw’s familiar visage returned. “Charles, you aren’t really angry, are you?” he crossed the room in a few quick strides and took Charles’ head in his hands to kiss his forehead, “There, there,” Shaw pulled him to his chest in a tight embrace. Charles could smell his own blood rising from Shaw’s flaccid cock. “Come sleep with me tonight, I’ll look after you. I won’t let him hurt you again. I just got into the spirit of him, you know, couldn’t stop myself.” 

Charles wanted to say, _That wasn’t him, that was you, he’d never-_ but why blame Shaw? If Charles hadn’t struggled, if he’d just closed his eyes and seduced Shaw as usual, it wouldn’t have happened. Why couldn’t he just have let it happen? Why’d he have to make a fuss now, of all times? He’d ruined it, he’d ruined his own memory of Erik, and for what? In defence of some misbegotten attempt at fidelity, the need to separate his old life from new? Stupid, stupid, stupid…

Shaw manoeuvred Charles onto the bed and tucked him under his arm, both of them lying on their backs. Charles stared at the fresco on the ceiling, of a battle between the titans and an army of sea monsters. He wanted to close his eyes and pretend to sleep, but he couldn’t take his eyes off those frozen, brawling creatures, their faces wracked with fury and their bodies twisted around each other in a combat that neither of them seemed to realise was nothing but a pageant. 

\---

“Are you ready?” Hank called. 

“I don’t think so,” Erik looked over his shoulder and shot the centaur a lopsided grin. “But I doubt I ever will be, so we better get this over with.”

“Are you sure I shouldn’t be in that hammock?” Raven asked. She stood a few feet away from the edge of the hill, her hand raised to shield her eyes. “You said Erik should do the test run because he’s lighter than you, but I’m more likely to survive if it… well, I’m sure it won’t, Hank, but if it does…”

“You’re scared of heights, you’ll panic and crash for sure,” Hank replied. “But I’m sure Erik appreciates the offer.”

“Very much, Raven, though maybe ask me again in about three minutes. Hank?”

Hank gave the straps of the hammock one last tug. Standing with his torso just behind the right wing of the flying machine, he grasped the supporting struts on the main body and broke into a gentle trot. As the slope of the hill increased, he began to run. The machine’s wheels shuddered and bounced on the uneven tussocks, making Erik’s teeth clack together. Hank was no longer pushing him along – Hank couldn’t even keep up, and finally he let go and the jolting quite suddenly stopped. The ground peeled away and the horizon swooped down into his line of sight. Distantly, he heard Raven shrieking and clapping. His stomach seemed to have dropped out to splat on the forest below. But he was doing it, he was flying, the wings and skeleton of the machine creaking around him and the wind stinging his eyes. Erik let out of a bray of laughter. He was flying, like some old story, like no human had ever done before!

Hank had made a clever design for steering, a combination of the rudder design of a trireme and his own innovations on the wings. Erik had practised as much as he could on land, but he found his movements on the steering overcompensated considerably, almost sending him careening down into the forest. He kept his shifts delicate after that, and managed to bring the machine around and thud down – mostly intact, though the sudden drop on one side meant he must have snapped off a back wheel – on the top of the hill. He’d been in the air for no more than three minutes. It had felt like hours. 

Raven bounded up to the machine, grinning from ear to ear. She leaned between the wooden ribs and the straps of the machine to kiss him on the cheek. “It was incredible! Just incredible, Erik! I was terrified for you!”

“That makes two of us,” Erik confessed. Hank arrived at a gallop, wide-eyed with glee. 

“How was it? How did it go?”

“It didn’t kill me,” Erik shrugged.

That afternoon, all three of them worked on fixing and improving the flying machine until the light began to run out. Hank was desperate to figure out a way to block the wind from Erik’s face, and came up with several design for thin-strung nets or sheets of wood that would direct the worst of the air to the sides. Raven eventually figured out a spell she knew from a friend-of-a-friend that could freeze water even in the midst of summer, and keep it frozen for hours. After a few tests, they managed to get a clear sheet of ice that could be fixed at the front of the machine and replaced afresh just before take-off. 

“I want to leave tomorrow,” Erik said. “I can fly to the foot of the mount by evening, given the speed I got up to today. I’ll leave after I’ve rested for the next night. I won’t have an ice-shield for the ascent, but I’ll just have to cope.”

Raven hugged her arms around herself. Her yellow eyes sparkled with tears. “I’m scared we’ll never see you again,” she said quietly. “You shouldn’t go.”

“After how far I’m come? I must, Raven.”

Hank shook his head and looked away. “Stupid, suicidal mortals.”

“You don’t have to be afraid,” Erik said. “I won’t tell anyone you both helped me. If there’s questions about where I got the flying machine, I’ll say I stole it.”

“Erik, that isn’t what I’m crying about,” Raven laughed, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand.

\---

The garden of the gods. 

He’d made it – or the crash killed him and this was the afterlife. But his right leg was in too much pain for him to be dead; he feared he’d broken it in his disastrous landing – he’d been half blind from the hours of wind and the light off the snow. 

The flying machine was a wreck on the lower lawn and would not carry him again (he’d had to cut himself out of the hammock, it was such a tangle). He was stuck – but then, he’d never really thought it was going to be as easy and dropping by for a cup of wine. _“Oh, ‘scuse me Shaw, god of all things, mind if I take Charles? Thanks, guess we won’t be seeing you.”_ He laughed to himself, despite aching ribs. 

In the glow of the setting sun, the garden cradled Erik and made him forget his pains. Birds flocked past, songs as harmonious as a pipe orchestra. The grass was as soft as combed wool. The waist-high orchids stretched curiously towards him as he passed. Even the stones were warm. Everything felt alive, and too crafted, too healthy, too bright in colour. He had a vivid image of Charles in his dream, how he too, had seemed too perfect. 

Distantly, he could hear music and what he thought might have been the hum of low conversation. He limped up a sweep of steps to a columned arbour, the cobbles fitting so precisely together the gaps between them were near-invisible. At the end of the walkway stood a huge structure whose architecture was skeletal, a shallow-domed roof supported by layers of open arches with no doors. The ring at the centre was veiled by shifting curtains made of thin gauze in a multitude of pastelline colours. Behind the curtains glowed the lights of bright oil lamps, already lit though the sun had not yet set completely. It was from there that the voices emanated.

Erik took a breath. There didn’t seem to be enough air to sate his lungs. He gripped the handle of the sword at his belt and headed towards the light.

About twenty feet from the grand pavilion, there was a crack and a swirl of red smoke, and two figures appeared at the entrance. Though they were facing away from Erik, they seemed to know he was there and turned at once to face him. 

One was in dark blue robes, and his skin was a smudged red like the smoke. The other was a man in crimson, his eyes narrowing as they took in the sight of Erik, bruised and dusty. If Erik had thought the garden seemed too perfect, he could barely comprehend these two. Shaw, and the messenger Azazel.

Gods. He was in the presence of gods.

“My lords, and you, the mightiest,” Erik sunk onto both knees, clasping his hands to his chest. His voice shook. “Forgive my blasphemy.”

Two women had appeared from within the pavilion. They both were far more beautiful than the statues that Erik had seen of them. Neither of them spoke, but the lead one – Angel, he knew, though he barely dared think her name – opened her mouth to speak.

Shaw raised his hand to silence her without looking around. He took a step towards Erik. “Well,” he rumbled. “This is a turn.”

“Forgive me,” Erik lowered his head. “I know that I have transgressed by coming here. My name is-”

“I know who you are,” Shaw cut him off. Erik didn’t dare look at him. 

“Then you know my endeavour,” Erik said. He reached for the sword at his belt, undid the ties of the sheath and laid it on the ground in front of him. “I have no challenge for you. I know I am your inferior in every way. So I ask only for myself – please, release your cupbearer.”

“You ask,” Shaw echoed. He gave a small laugh and turned to the gods around him. His voice felt like a blow across Erik’s shoulders. “He asks. Without even a bargain to offer.”

Angel would not stay silent. “You don’t need me to attest to the strength of his love. The very fact that he’s here proves it.”

“I can offer myself,” Erik said frantically around his dry, swollen tongue. “They say a willing human sacrifice is the most powerful gift a god can receive – if you will take my life in exchange for his-” he raised his head, holding Shaw’s eyes. “I have no hesitation. I will die for him.”

Shaw shook his head. “As if your life were worth even that much,” he sneered, and raised his hand. 

Erik heard Angel and Azazel cry out as the world filled with lightning and he heard nothing more. 

\---

Charles filled Logan’s goblet and stepped back, glancing along the gold-covered table. Most of the places were empty, the cups of the gods standing to attention but unclaimed. Riptide sauntered in the back door, taking the seat furthest from where Frost’s cup stood. He snapped his fingers and pointed. Charles hurried around to top him up.

“What do you suppose is keeping them?” he asked, the question directed more towards Logan. Frost and Angel had suddenly stood up and walked out mere moments before.

Logan shrugged. “I don’t intend to wait,” he grunted, and tore into the sautéed duck that sat in front of him on a platter of hard bread. 

Charles frowned at the front entrance. The gauze veils fluttered a little in the faint breeze, but with the lamps on this side he couldn’t see more than the faintest shapes on the far side. He could make out others beside Frost and Angel; Shaw and Azazel had arrived as well. So why were they all standing outside? He probably shouldn’t disturb them.

And then there was a massive flash, and a metallic crack that Charles had become familiar with in the last few months. Logan and Riptide raised their heads quickly.

“Those were Shaw’s bolts,” Logan frowned.

Charles’ heart stopped, and then returned at triple the pace. He dashed for the front entrance, tearing down the gauze curtain. He nearly crashed into Frost standing in the outer archway and did knock right into Angel, sending her stumbling.

Shaw stood a few paces ahead, Azazel a vague figure on the right. In the centre of the walkway, about twenty feet along the arbour, a human shape lay on the stones. It was very still, limbs prone except for one arm stretched out from its body. 

Charles ran. He did not notice he was still carrying the amphora of ambrosia until it slipped from his grasp and shattered. The sound echoed around the garden, but Charles was already on his knees beside the body.

“No.”

Erik’s eyes were half-closed, a look of faint surprise and only a little pain on his face. In the centre of his chest was a burned laceration wider than two hands. 

“No, no, Erik,” Charles curled over the body’s shoulders, clasping Erik’s face between his hands, putting his ear close to the mouth, feeling nothing. He reached out for the broken amphora, scooped as much of the nectar into his hand as he could, and tried to tip it into Erik’s mouth, rub it into his lips – ambrosia had healed Charles on his first day in the garden, it would bring Erik back – but the amber syrup dripped along the line of Erik’s jaw, and his breathing did not stir his chest. 

He was aware of the gods gathered behind him, watching in silence. He raised his head to them. “Logan,” he croaked. “Logan, you’re god of healing. You can bring him back,” he could barely keep himself propped upright on his hands and knees. “Logan, please, I’ll do anything you ask!”

Logan shook his head slowly. “His shade has already flown, kid.”

The world seemed to be spinning into a blur around Charles. He was aware that he was still speaking, stupid little words interspersed by Erik’s name. Then he couldn’t speak through the sobs in his throat, and all that came out were soft whimpers. He curled himself over the body again, hugging his arms around Erik’s head, kissing one eyebrow. Erik’s hair smelled of snow and many days of travelling. His skin was still warm. Charles wasn’t sure who was making those stupid, sobbing noises. It couldn’t be him. He was the cupbearer of the gods. He had powers no mortal could dream of. He was dignified and strong, and he wouldn’t be crouched here sobbing over one dead ex-slave.

He couldn’t be gone, he couldn’t be, he couldn’t be he couldn’t. 

Behind him, he could hear an argument breaking out.

“You have broken the laws of _xenia_ , of hospitality,” Angel was saying in a high voice. “He was a guest!”

“He was an intruder, and a madman,” Shaw replied with a snarl.

“You are the god of _xenia_. You had no right,” Azazel said in a low voice. 

“All that I am and do is right!” Shaw bellowed. “Do not question me again!”

Charles didn’t care. What did stupid rules matter now? Didn’t they understand that Erik needed their help? Didn’t they understand how important it was? “Come back,” Charles whispered against Erik’s skin. “Come back.”

“Stand up,” Shaw’s voice cut across him like a whip. Charles flinched. “I said stand up!”

Charles pushed himself away from the body and got to his feet slowly. He turned towards the god.

“You will stop this absurdity at once,” Shaw said. There was a black shiver in his voice that Charles had never heard before. “He was nothing but the lowliest of mortals. He would have died of illness within five years anyway. I have given you everything, I have even set you free of him, and you cannot meet my eye?”

Charles had been staring at the floral carving on the nearest column. With an enormous effort, he turned his gaze to meet Shaw’s. 

He felt his features crumple. “He was perfect,” he spat. “Compared to him you are nothing but long-lived.”

Shaw raised his hand and struck Charles in the face. Charles didn’t even try to dodge, and the blow landed as heavy as a charging bull. He heard a wet, tearing crack and felt a burst of pain. When the blackness cleared from his vision he found he was lying on the cobbles, staring at Frost’s perfect feet as she crouched down beside him. He couldn’t feel any part of his body except the warm stones against the side of his head. He couldn’t even feel his own breathing, and why wouldn’t his lungs pull in the air? 

“You’ve broken his neck, my love,” Frost said impassively. “He’ll be dead very soon.”

“He’ll recover. Get him out,” Shaw’s voice rolled across all of them. “Get rid of him! I will punish him as I see fit when he is restored. Go!”

Charles found the sounds were fading with the sights in front of his eyes. He couldn’t feel the hands reach around his body, but he saw the ground shift as he was lifted up. His last thought was, _my god,_ for Shaw was the only god that mattered any more, _you have no idea the enemy you have made for yourself._


	5. screaming flowers

The night birds were singing. There were no insects in the garden; worms and slugs, yes, but no bees or beetles or even butterflies. No frogs either. Only the birds, and the gods.

In his little pavilion, Charles listened and tried to empty his whole self. He tried to find serenity, to accept that something terrible had happened and he must now walk around it and carry on. He tried to tell himself that he was still living in paradise, might still one day join the ranks of the conclave.

And then – Erik’s face – everything he must have done to get here – and Shaw had killed him like he was _nothing_ \- had not even given Charles a chance to speak to him, a chance to refresh his memory, to tell Erik how proud he was that he’d got this far-

He closed his eyes. He could imagine Erik coming in, sitting on the bed. He imagined Erik taking his hand, the feel of his scarred and calloused workman’s fingers, and Erik saying, “You didn’t think I could do it.”

“I did,” Charles whispered. “At least, I was afraid you could.”

Imagined-Erik laughed. “Would I laugh if I were real?” he asked Charles. “You don’t know. Did you really even know me? You didn’t expect me to wait for you until the war ended. You never thought I would work together with Moira. You couldn’t believe I might ascend the Mount alone. But I did,” he leaned in to kiss Charles’ cheek, his imagined grip tightening on Charles’ hand. “We were strangers, and we had a fantasy in each other, and it got me killed. Let it go.”

Charles tried to shake his head, but his fragile neck screamed in white-hot pain. He clenched his hands. Empty air was inside them, but he could feel his nails dig into his palm. He was healing, drop by drop, thread by thread. If someone had given him a mouthful of ambrosia it’d be faster, but the last of the ambrosia was in the broken amphora and Shaw forbade the gods to do Charles’ job for him, to gather the nectar from the plants. So they hadn’t. They couldn’t even manage that small defiance.

Charles listened to the night birds and tried to do nothing.

\---

It was Frost who finally came to him. He was just feeling strong enough to sit up when she appeared in the doorway, in her usual white robe but with a shawl draped over her hair and a lumpy bundle under one arm. He relaxed back against the pillows, reluctant for her to know he was able to move.

“You don’t have to play sick, Charles,” she clicked her tongue, pulling over a stool and arranging herself aesthetically on it. “You must be pretty well healed by now.”

He turned his head to look at her, but didn’t bother to sit up again. He said in a voice that sounded like straw, “Where is Erik’s body? I don’t want him to stay in this garden any longer.”

“Then your wish is granted. Logan and Azazel threw it off the cliffs some hours ago.”

Charles abandoned the pretence of paralysis and shoved himself upright, “No!” he reached out and grasped Frost’s arm, even when she wrinkled her nose and pulled away. “Please, help me find him – I need to cremate him, I need to put a coin in his mouth—”

Frost jerked her wrist out of his hand as if his outburst had physically hurt her. “They did it for your sake, Charles. You think my husband is above desecrating the dead? The things he said he would do to the body – even I am not cruel enough to tell you.”

A wave of dizziness washed over Charles and he lowered himself back against the pillows, fresh pain shooting up and down his neck. Erik’s corpse uncared for, left to freeze or rot on the mountainside. He felt the dizziness become a swelling nausea and just barely managed to repress his need to vomit.

He croaked, “Are you going to summon Shaw now? To tell him I’m restored?”

“Of course not,” Frost smiled without moving any part of her face but her lips. “I’m going to help you escape him.”

Charles said nothing for a long while, turning his head to look her in the eyes. He was numb to the idea, especially coming from Frost. “And why would you show such sudden generosity towards me?”

“Because I want him to hate you,” Frost said, sounding almost concerned. “I want him to think twice before he brings another rival for me into this garden. I want him to remember your betrayal every time he takes a new lover.”

“My betrayal,” Charles pushed himself upright a little further. “He killed him!” he howled. “He took him from me, and there was – no – need! There was no need,” tears slipped from his stinging eyes now and he bent his head to wipe them away. “I betrayed no one. I tried to love everyone.”

Frost allowed him a moment of indignity, but she had no patience for his grief. “Do you want my help or not?”

“If you’re so eager,” Charles muttered.

“I can create an illusion of you, lying in this bed, that will convince even Shaw. It will not last more than two hours. Before those are up, you must reach the Alcyonian Lake, which has no floor beneath its waters. You know you cannot drown in it; you can descend down until you reach Hades, the abode of the dead. It is the only place Shaw – and even my dream chair – cannot find you.”

Charles raised his head. "I can do that?"

"I know what you're thinking, but don't," Frost leaned forward. "You can't bring his shade back from the underworld. Even if you could find it - and that is highly unlikely - a shade can only be revived by the touch of sunlight. Do you know what will happen if you bring him into the sunlight?"

Charles just stared at her. He wasn't going to ask 'What?', because he was already thinking, 'It doesn't matter what, I'll do it-'

"The moment you step outside of Darwin's realm, Shaw will find you. And he will kill you both, and it will be slow. He may even make it last for eternity. I know you're pragmatic and I know you're clever, sweetie, so I advise you not to turn into an idealistic hero this late in the game," she shrugged. "Though it's your choice."

Charles was silent.

"Here," she placed the bundle she was carrying on the bed beside him. "This is your dead love's sword, your cloak, and Angel's wings. Leave the wings on the shore of the lake, my servants will bring them back to me - Angel doesn't know I've borrowed them, but I'm sure she'll forgive me. And you may as well take this," she reached into the depths of her robe and placed a gleaming shape on top of the bundle. 

Many flat beads, misshapen and tinged with soot, and the glint of shattered rubies. Moira’s engagement necklace.

"I took it from the body," Frost said. "The bolt hit almost directly upon it. It was melted into his flesh."

Charles reached out and fingered the necklace. "Thank you."

"I'm only serving my own interests, sweetie," Frost stood up, tucking her shawl more warmly about her head. "But good luck anyway."

\---

The moment he was sure she was heading back to her quarters, Charles swung his legs out of the bed. He had only a woven cloth ribbon for a belt, but when he tied the scabbard to it, it seemed to hold. He hung the wings from the other side of his belt, stuffed the necklace down the front of his chiton and folded the cloak under his arm. After some consideration he picked up the unlit oil lamp from the wall and hung that from his belt, too. When he glanced back at the bed, he found he was looking at himself, sleeping with his eyes closed and a wrinkle on his brow. Frost really was quite the illusionist, which was something her priestesses never mentioned at her festivals. 

Outside, the air was warm as ever despite their location, the stars burning like the bonfires of a waiting army. Charles gritted his teeth at the sight of the moon sitting just-past-full in the cloudless sky. He would have been better served by the cover of darkness, but ah well - he would never get another chance. 

He bent low and ran as fast and quiet as he could.

He saw no one and did not even disturb the birds on his way to the ambrosia garden. After one last glance around, he spread his cloak as wide as it would go and then fell to his knees in the rich earth. His neck still throbbed from the weight of his head when he bent forward, but it would have to cope. 

He wrapped his hand around the stalk of the nearest plant at its base, dug his fingers down into the dirt below, and pulled it up. The rip of the roots tearing free seemed dangerously loud, but he would have to hope no one was close by. 

He scoured the dirt briefly to make sure no major roots had been left behind. He had never seen ambrosia plants produce seeds, but Logan had explained how to grow new stems from cuttings. Carefully, making sure not to let any of the leaves or flowers break off and fall on the ground, he laid the plant on his cloak and turned to the next. 

Working as quickly as he could, it still took almost half an hour to clear the garden completely. He couldn’t quite stretch the cloak right around the whole bundle, but he knotted the ties around it. The plants had seemed so light when he’d been pulling them out one by one, but together the weight slung across his back was almost more than he could lift in his state. The exertion seemed to kick the healing process up a notch, however, and after a few steps he felt strong enough to break into a run.

He took a winding back-path to the west cliff, crept along the side of the pergola and down to his little temple under the twisted oak. In the moonlight it looked silver and ghostly, and his breath echoed loudly as he crouched low to fit inside with the load on his back. It was almost totally black within, though he could make out the faint shape of the altar and feel the comforting whisper of the prayer tiles under his feet. 

Each temple was their own – Charles couldn’t enter those of the gods, and they could not enter his. That’s just how the garden worked. 

He threw the ambrosia plants down on the floor in front of the altar, cloak and all. For a moment he stood, panting in deep, slow heaves. His shoulders trembled. He could hear the flowers mewling faintly. Alive, everything in the garden as alive. The gods were alive. They hadn’t hurt him. He couldn’t—

But he could still feel Shaw inside of him, thrusting, relentless. Could see the flash of the lightning through the gauze curtain. Could smell the snow freshly melted in Erik’s hair. How still his body had been. How none of them had stopped Shaw, though they’d known for eons what he was.

No more.

Charles took the lamp from his belt, struck the flint until it ignited, and then tossed it against the altar. The pottery shattered, splashing oil in all directions, and the flames flashed outwards.

The ambrosia plants began to burn.

Charles could hear them screaming, very faintly, like children’s voices from a distance when you can’t tell whether they laughing or crying. He could feel each prayer tile as the heat reached it, as the lacquer blistered and the ceramic cracked. As the residue of each prayer broke, Charles felt the strength it had provided leave him. This was what would happen to all the gods, without the ambrosia to renew their connection with their followers. Without the strength from prayers, their miracles would begin to waver and become scarcer. Without miracles, the love and belief would fade, accelerating the growing impotence of the god, feeding back into a mutual collapse. They would still be immortal, but Logan had spoken of old gods in the past tense, so who knew if immortality was ever sure?

Charles didn’t have time to ponder it. The temple was filling with smoke. He had to raise his arms and feel the doorway as he stumbled out onto the grass. The west cliff was just along the path and through a band of tamarisk shrubs. He checked the sword and wings were still firmly attached at his belt and stepped out of the shade of the oak.

That was when he realised he was being watched. Logan was on the rise where the lawn met the pergola. He was breathing heavily, as if he’d sprinted the distance from his pavilion. Perhaps he’d heard the ambrosia screaming. 

Charles found himself frozen in a hunch. Logan crossed the space between them in a blink and grabbed Charles above the elbows. His lips were pulled back and the look in his eyes was wild, his huge muscles shivering like a bear rising onto its hind legs. He could rip a man’s head from his neck with one hand.

“What have you done?” he hissed.

Charles shook his head. “No more gods.”

From somewhere over the garden rose a cry “Fire! Fire in the garden!” – Azazel, and then Angel joining him, calling for Riptide and Frost to awaken. Logan shoved Charles towards the west cliff. 

“Go!”

Charles was so surprised he just stumbled, but then he heard the boom of Shaw’s voice calling for Riptide to bring the rain and he came awake with a jolt. Without looking back at Logan he bolted down the path, took the shrubs at a staggered leap, unhitched the wings from his belt and slipped them on even as the ground sloped and then vanished completely from beneath him.

It wasn’t a graceful jump, but it didn’t matter, because there was plenty of falling-time to get the wings working.

\---

The only thing faster than Angel's wings was Azazel, and he could only race Charles if he knew the destination. There was always the chance that they wouldn’t immediately figure out where he was going, that he would reach the lake before they had searched all the more obvious spots.

But as the star-speckled mirror of the Alcyonian lake appeared out of the arms of the valley, Charles was not in the least bit surprised to see a figure standing on the shore, nothing but a dark, man-shaped shadow at this distance. Dawn was approaching; the moon had dipped low and the bottomless lake was in the shadow of the mountain ranges. Of course, Frost would have told Azazel what Charles was doing the moment she realised the devastation he had wrought. 

“I’ll drop like a stone,” Charles told himself, though he couldn’t hear his words above the stinging wind in his ears. “I’ll go straight to the centre of the lake and then just drop.”

He never got that far. As he shot over the beach, a crack hit his ears and in mid-air, his shoulder slammed into something solid and alive that wrapped tight arms around him. Again came the crack and this time a stinking burst of volcanic fumes and suddenly the ground was an armspan below him instead of a hundred feet. 

They hit the beach and rolled, sand spattering Charles’ face. Azazel had grabbed whatever he could lay his hands on, and Charles writhed and jerked at the ties of the wings, freeing himself of their straps and flinging them – still fluttering like a huge, dying cranefly – into Azazel’s face. He was on his feet before Azazel, and had drawn his sword by the time the god cast the shivering wings aside. 

“You know, of course,” hissed Azazel, drawing his own twin blades, “that I am god of soldiers as well as hearths and messages?” 

“We had your shrine in the barracks,” Charles replied, and halfway through the last word he thrust forward with the sword, light and agile, forged by Alex the smith, the one Erik had said was the best in the polis. His weapon had a much longer reach that Azazel’s two, but the god parried and slashed at Charles’ throat. Charles ducked and struck and drew back as he was deflected again. 

“Did you pray to me?”

“Every day.”

They scuffed the sand as they shifted in a slow circle. It was coarse against Charles’ bare feet. He hadn’t worn sandals since his abduction. 

“What happens if I pray to you now, do you think?” Charles asked. “Do I get your blessing and you strength from the prayer? Or do they cancel each other out?” He was concentrating half on the lake, away on his left. If he could turn Azazel’s back to the mountains, maybe he’d get a chance to run for the waterline.

But then he saw a second figure watching them, robes rippling in the faint breeze, the fabric almost black in the low light. Of course Azazel had not come alone. Of course Shaw had wanted to make sure Charles was brought back to face retribution. 

Azazel flickered in and out of the world with a burst of brimstone, driving a tight slash towards Charles even as he reappeared, but Charles figured he’d come from behind and had already spun. He raised his sword to meet Azazel’s blade and the clang made his teeth rattle. It was like a bull’s horns had collided with his arms. He couldn’t even believe the bronze was still intact. His feet sprayed sand as he was driven back and he stumbled, ducked under a sweep of the other knife and hurried to put some ground between them. His shoulders hurt.

He couldn’t keep this up for much longer, and Azazel knew it. The expression on the god’s face was lazy now, underlaid with anger, and his posture confident as he paced left and then right, driving Charles towards where Shaw still stood unmoving as a mountain.

Charles took a breath, and smashed forward, stabbing wildly, just enough to get Azazel back into a rock-steady stance. Then he swerved away and sprinted for the waterline, shoving the sword back into its sheath.

There was a distant whirr. He heard the burst of lightning at the same moment he saw the flash, and then it hit him. 

It didn’t throw him across the beach as he’d expected. It was like his surface had been struck like a gong. Every muscle in his body wrung itself into contraction, his teeth biting down on the inside of his cheek and his sensitive neck feeling half-broken again as the surrounding muscle whipped it back. He felt the lightning pass through him and then dissipate, and he fell like he was already dead and hit the sand with a _shush_. 

He wasn’t dead, though. Maybe Shaw hadn’t used his full power, or maybe being immortal gave him some protection, but he was just stunned. His brain felt baked and his limbs were still twitching, like a half-crushed insect. His vision was full of white sparks. He wasn’t sure how many seconds had gone past, but he struggled to get to his feet, aware of at least one figure approaching as a swift stride—

Shaw’s hand reached down and grabbed him around the neck. He didn’t know how he knew it was Shaw. Perhaps he had been grabbed and groped and caressed by those hands so many times that he simply knew the exact shape and texture of him, the specific way they tightened around his flesh. He thrashed for a moment, but Shaw’s other hand drew back – Charles could see him only as a silhouette cut out against the stars – and then plunged forward.

White pain, incalculably more than the lightning or indeed anything Charles had ever, ever felt in his life, exploded low on Charles’ torso. He screamed without even thinking about it; thought was gone, everything had fled his brain except the agony. For a moment his mind slid down a steep slope into the black fog of sleep, and he gritted his teeth and restored one thought to it: _stay conscious stay conscious stay conscious_.

He clawed his mind back up the slope. His vision returned in patches, and his eyes readjusted to see Shaw’s face, features hard, without a scrap of compassion in it. One hand was still pinning Charles to the ground by his neck, and both of Charles’ hands were around that wrist. Charles managed to look down.

Shaw’s other hand was buried in his abdomen. He had punched right through the soft flesh below Charles’ ribcage, on his left side, at about navel height. There was a bloody, sucking mouth of flesh around Shaw’s wrist. His hand was still inside Charles. 

“Feel that?” Shaw hissed, and _nonono_ the hand was moving, pushing through him. “That’s your kidney. Or it was,” he crushed his fingers closed and something inside Charles burst. “Let’s keep going,” Shaw whispered, almost loving now, and strained in deeper. “I can feel your spine through the membranes of your gut cavity. It’d be so easy to snap, and you’d be helpless. It would be a shame to wait for you to heal again, but if you’re going to insist on running, I will do it. Well?”

Charles could feel protrusions – Shaw’s fingers – dig into the muscles around his lower back. _Stay conscious_. His vision swayed like he was on the deck of a storm-tossed ship. He managed to focus on Azazel standing to attention just behind Shaw, knives at the ready. 

“Wait, wait, _wait_ ,” he croaked. Blood from his bitten cheek spattered out of his mouth and onto his chin. “There’s one flower left.”

Shaw’s fingers froze. He hand around Charles’ neck tightened, almost cutting off his windpipe. “You’re a lying little whore.”

“No, no, I kept one for myself,” Charles strained for breath, “I planted it on the way here. Let me live, just let me come back with you and serve you, my god,” he begged, letting the urge to sob come bubbling up out of him to complete the picture. “I’ll tell you where it is,” and then he added, as if in afterthought, “You can have all of it, there’s only enough ambrosia for one.”

Shaw’s eyes widened. Whether his understanding at Charles’ treachery clicked into place or not, Charles wasn’t sure. But behind him, Azazel’s shoulders tensed, and then – with only a moment’s hesitation – he swept his knife through the air and sliced Shaw’s head from his shoulders.

Hot, rusty blood gushed over Charles’ face. He pried the hand from his throat and managed to pull the other fist out of his gut as Shaw’s body tumbled over. He wriggled backwards on the beach, pressing one hand to the gaping hole in his midriff. Shaw’s head lay on its right ear a few feet away, an expression of unbridled fury on its features. It was mouthing Azazel’s name, but without lungs or a voicebox no sound came out. 

Charles twisted away from the advancing messenger.

“Where is it?” Azazel bellowed. “Tell me!”

“I buried it above a tomb,” Charles invented, his teeth clicking as his body began to shudder. How much blood had he lost? Much more than he could afford. What was going to happen if he tried to stand up? Would he pass out? He had to spare one hand from holding his intestines in so that he could push himself to his knees. The pain erupted through him once again, but he kept going until he was standing up, hunched over his bleeding abdomen. 

“What tomb?” Azazel loomed over him, following him as he tried to stumble backwards. Charles’ eyes flickered around them, searching for something, anything – and saw Shaw’s body propping itself up on one elbow, the other arm outstretched. It seemed his eyes were still communicating with the rest of him, because he was pointing directly at Azazel and Charles.

Charles froze to give Shaw’s body time to aim. He looked up at Azazel, whose eyes were almost popping out of his face with anger and desperation. He was concentrating only on Charles. 

Charles strained his ears. He panted, and then said with a sneer, “Erik’s tomb,” just as he heard the whirr of the building lightning. He dived sideways as the bolt exploded from Shaw’s hand, and it hit only Azazel instead of both of them.

He didn’t look back to see what damage had been done. He ran, barely clinging to consciousness, both hands clutched to his side. He splashed into the lake. Ooze and slime slid under his feet and he stubbed his toes on stones and caught his ankles in weed. He ducked low and felt for the largest rock he could carry in both hands, letting the wound open and his life’s blood begin to seep out into the water. Didn’t matter. He hauled the rock up and stuffed it down the front of the chiton, forcing him to bend forward from the weight. It almost slipped out of the hole in the fabric where Shaw had punched through and he would have laughed, if he’d had any breath to spare.

The water was up to his waist, and then it was pressing cold into the wound, and he slammed his jaws together and hugged his arms around the rock and kept going. Quite suddenly, the lake floor was not under his next footstep and he toppled forward and sank before he could take a last gasp.

The shock of the cold water across his body left him immobile for a scant couple of seconds, and then he began to swim further towards the centre of the lake, even as the rock dragged him down and down. Soon enough his head and chest were in agony from the lack of air, but he kept his limbs moving until the very last moment. 

Unaware of anything more, he sank.


	6. grave robbers and grave survivors

Charles awoke in stages. For almost a minute he was only aware that he was awake, and that the air was still and uncomfortably cold. He could hear the quiet drip of water. After a while he realised his body was stiff with cold, and that he was lying on a very hard surface. Sometime after that, he felt confident enough to move and open his eyes.

He was on the floor of a high-roofed cavern. The rock above his head looked slick and strangely translucent, and he finally realised he was looking up at the lake from underneath, the water thick with silt and the occasional shadow of fish. He lay in a huge, shallow stone bowl, high up near the lip. It was piled with stones and the bones of fish and animals that had fallen into the lake. 

He got to his feet slowly, removing the stone that had weighed him down and placing it gingerly on the ground. He didn’t feel he had the right to disturb the peace of this place. The hole that Shaw had punched into his gut was mostly healed already, shrunken and scabbed over. He must have been asleep for some hours. 

He climbed to the top of the bowl, slipping on wet slime and crunching bones beneath his feet. There was a perfectly semi-circular arch up there, carved without bricks or any sign of artistry. He entered it cautiously, and found it lit by small, green-glowing globes. When he raised his hand to touch one, it withdrew with a squelchy clicking. The lights were the tail-tips of huge worms, with heavy, sticky threads hanging beneath. Charles made sure to avoid walking directly beneath the lights and kept his hands in front of him.

As he walked, the tunnel sloped downwards at an almost undetectable angle and branched behind him, growing larger with each new tributary. He became aware of faceless shadows hurrying past him or dragging themselves to keep up. He shuddered and hugged his arms around himself, but the shades moved past and around him without acknowledging him.

At last the tunnel had grown so wide it could no longer be fairly called a tunnel, but a cavern, but a field of stone. The roof was so high there was no echo of Charles’ footsteps. Small, flying creatures that definitely weren’t birds flitted back and forth, chittering to each other. 

Then the cavern grew impossibly larger and they reached the river. Charles couldn’t see the far bank, shrouded in mist that turned into clouds above his head, faintly spitting rain down into the water below. The shades were everywhere, bunched thick on the banks and even standing in the water up to their waists, their chests, their heads – possibly they were right under the water where he couldn’t see them. These were the unlucky dead who had come to the underworld without burial rites, without _epitaphias_ oration and a coin under their tongues. 

Erik would be here.

Charles began to look at the shades properly. He found with a mounting panic that he could scarcely tell one from the other. Their faces were blank, their bodies only roughly male or female, this one tall and that one short, only the vaguest shapes of hair and facial features. 

“Erik!” he called, his voice bouncing off the tunnel behind him but swallowed in the fog. “Erik!”

There was no answer. The shades walked on around him.

A shape was pulling out of the mist like a shadow come to life. It resolved into a long, broad barge with a man at its prow, apparently propelling the boat with a pole even though Charles could see from the shades in the water that the river was too deep for punting. Charles knew he was the Man in Black, a demi-god who had been banished to the underworld for helping Darwin in his rebellion. Charles gulped and headed to the edge of the water to meet the boat.

“Excuse me,” he said, as the boat ground against the bank with a crunch. It had worn a perfectly-shaped hollow into the stone over centuries of use. “Excuse me,” Charles raised his voice. “I’m looking for someone.”

The shades bumped him as they poured past, filling the boat as fast they could. Each presented the Man in Black with a coin; those few that didn’t have them stayed standing on the bank, staring blankly across the water. Charles allowed himself to be swept up onto the barge. As he reached the boatman, the Man in Black grabbed his collar and held out his hand. 

“I don’t have…” Charles began, and the man shook him. He was at least as strong as Shaw, and Charles fumbled quickly to find something to pay. He didn’t want to give up his sword, but he’d left Angel’s wings on the beach. Then he felt a hard series of shapes, which had slipped around to the side of his tunic, and pulled out the misshapen remains of Moira’s gold engagement necklace. The Man in Black took it and slipped it into his pocket, releasing Charles. He was driven forward by the shades, away from the boatman.

“No, wait!” Charles strained back. “Erik isn’t here, let me go back, he’s on the riverbank—”

The shades were a jostling, emotionless sea. He couldn’t fight against them. The boat was pushing away from the stone now and moving freely on the water, floating into the depths of the mist. 

They seemed to be on the river for an endless length of time. Charles sat with his feet hanging over the edge of the barge, lulled by the sway of the boat, wondering distantly what would happen if he jumped in. 

On the far side, the roof of the cavern was no longer visible, only the cloud. Charles was swept off the barge onto a surface of short, grey grass. The mass of shades wandered away. It was unclear whether they had any place to go. One shade who was missing his legs from the knees down was carried by two others, though they had not seemed companions before then. Charles was left standing on the far bank of the river as the boat left to collect the dead once again. 

He began to walk. He felt half-asleep, and hopeless. No wonder Frost had sent him down here. This was no escape. This was just emptiness. He felt as if the cold air was hollowing him out, slowly turning into a paper shell of his previous self. Turning into a shade.

Above him, a pair of heavy gates emerged out of the mist. They hung wide open, and Charles walked up to the threshold without even thinking about it. 

The second he stepped over, there was a low growl. Out of the mist barrelled something larger and much more animated than the stone and grass world or the dead shades. Charles drew his sword as the three-headed creature bounded towards him – ‘dog’ didn’t describe it, and neither did ‘bear’ or the names of any animals in his experience. He tried to dart away and one huge head twisted and butted him with the force of a landslide. He went flying and rolled several times on the short, prickly grass. He was on his feet again in a moment, his wound freshly opened and oozing a little. He raised the sword; no trying to get away this time, he’d have to take a stab at an eye or a throat, maybe he’d get lucky—

“Stop.”

The creature, backing up for another pounce, froze.

“Sit.”

Charles, gulping the cold, tasteless air, gaped as the monster settled back on its haunches. Its mouths opened and it panted, tongues hanging out and dribbling onto the grass.

Out of the mist walked the first and last god most people ever saw. Charles lowered his sword, resisting the urge to kneel.

Darwin halted very close in front of him. He pointed at Charles’ sword. “Your weapon is blessed in my name. It cannot harm anything in my realm.”

Charles looked down at it. “Oh. I didn’t know.”

“I see. Come, little Charles, once-cupbearer to the Conclave,” the god said. “It’s cold out here, and you’re bleeding.”

\---

The god had clearly guessed some of what had transgressed on the Mount. Charles found himself invited into a mansion of black stone, not empty – a few living servants greeted them with smiles, and brought food and wine to the shrouded balcony where Darwin led him. One even came forward with a long, deep purple robe to replace the torn, bloody chiton. They placed a bowl of warm water in front of Charles, and bandages for the swiftly healing wound. He sponged the worst of the gore, sand and slime from his body, scrubbed the last of Shaw’s blood off his face, and got dressed while Darwin was speaking quietly to his servants. Charles saw that most were wearing symbols of the Cult of Darwin on their clothes or pendants, or dangling from their ears. They were devotees who had been chosen by the god to serve him in his realm. Some of them were very old, some young and cheerful. Not immortal, then. Just living out their lives in the manner of their faith. 

Darwin had been looking at Charles’ sword while he was dressing, but handed it back once Charles turned around in the dark robe. “It’s a good sword. I hear prayers from the man who made it; he is a good man, clearly believed it was worth his time. I’ve given it my blessing – it will be stronger now.”

“Oh, um, thank you, my lord.”

Darwin poured him a glass of diluted wine and pressed it into Charles’ hand. “You’ve done well,” he said, settling himself on a long couch with black and gold upholstery. There was a brazier burning to one side that exuded more heat than its small size belied. “Please, sit down, you are my guest.”

Charles sat cross-legged on the couch behind him. His body ached. His _spirit_ ached. He brought the cup to his lips – and then remembered Persephone and the pomegranate and stopped. He put the cup down gently on the nearest table.

“I mean no offense,” he said quickly, as Darwin eyed it. “It’s just…”

“You want to go back some day.”

“Now, if I could,” Charles said. “But I can’t leave without Erik.”

“Then you can’t leave,” Darwin said, but his tone was sympathetic. He sipped his own wine, watching Charles. “Did you see his shade, on your way to my gates?”

“No.”

“Of course you didn’t. And even I don’t know which is his. They are all the same, now. They are at peace.”

Charles leaned forward, his heart thudding. “But people have brought shades back from the dead – haven’t they?”

“In times long past,” Darwin said quietly. “Not while I have ruled here.”

This news wrenched at Charles and he hung his head. He watched one of the servants come forward and tip an amber drop of something into Darwin’s cup. He recognised it even from this distance.

“You have an ambrosia plant,” he guessed.

Darwin glanced over his cup and the corner of his mouth flicked into a smile. “You guess right. I stole one small cutting from the garden before I was banished. It’s hard to grow anything in this soil, without sunlight, but,” he raised his cup to Charles, “I am the great survivor.”

“You should protect it,” Charles said numbly. “It’s very valuable.”

That was obvious anyway, so Darwin saw that there was something more to his words and asked, “What do you mean?”

Charles told him what he had done. Darwin listened without speaking until he fell silent. The god said at last, “So war may be inevitable again. Will you stay down here, and fight for me?” his eyes flashed towards the sword at Charles’ belt. “You will find you grow much more powerful by my side.”

Charles swallowed. “My loyalties now lie only with Erik.”

“You know, of course, that Shaw saved your life?” Darwin drained his cup and rolled it between his hands. “That day on the battlefield. He took you in the moment just before you were destined to die. And your friend, who you think sacrificed so much to reach you – he would have fallen to some winter illness next year anyway, unmarried and unknown. Now he will become a legend. Shaw has given both of you much more than you realise.”

Charles pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. “Fuck him, and fuck you too. You gods are all the same. Thinking that everything you do it right because right is what you make it.”

Darwin laughed. “And you think humans are any different?” he put his cup down, “The only difference is power.”

Charles nodded, too lost and weary to argue. “Will I be immortal forever?”

“Without ambrosia, it will fade. The more often you are injured, the faster your time will run out.”

Charles thought of the legless shade, carried by two others who didn’t even know it – the weakest creatures helping each other while the gods themselves fought over the imagined scraps of an ambrosia plant. Then frowned and raised his head. “The shades have the injuries they bore when they died.”

“To some extent,” Darwin answered. “Why?”

“I can find Erik,” Charles said, swinging his legs off the couch. “If you let me return to the other side of the river, where the ones who can’t pay the boatman are waiting – I can find him!” he paused, fear running through him. “Will you let me take him?”

“Where will you go?” Darwin asked quietly, not reprovingly. “If you return to the living world, Shaw will find you.”

“Is there nothing you can do? No way to hide us from him?” Charles begged. “In stories, you have a Helm of Darkness that can make the wearer invisible even to the gods—”

“I do, and it is not something I lend out,” Darwin cut him off sharply. His expression hardened for a moment and Charles flinched. But when he spoke again, his tone was softer. “There may be – something. The seeds of the ambrosia plant are tiny and infertile, but I have tried to hybridise them with the flowers of the underworld to produce new growths. Some have given nectar, but none of my experiments so far have provided the drinker with immortality. Most are, in fact, deadly. But there was – one plant in particular that had a strange effect.”

“That will save us from Shaw?”

“I truly don’t know. You can return to the land of the living, but it will mean giving up everything you have known – and I mean everything,” Darwin frowned. “Your home. Your clever fiancé. Your skills and your knowledge will become useless, even your language. You may not live long. But – you will both be alive, and Shaw will not be able to harm you.”

“I’ll do it,” said Charles without hesitation. 

Darwin leaned back and summoned one of his servants with a crooked finger. He whispered to her, and she nodded and slipped away into the house. When she returned she was carrying a crystal vial about the size of Charles’ thumb. Darwin took it, peered into it, and then tossed it to Charles.

He caught it with a fumble. The nectar inside was colourless and thick. He went to uncap it, but Darwin shook his head. “Wait until you’re in the sunlight. I’ll show you a path that emerges in a graveyard outside a distant city. Find an open tomb awaiting an urn and go inside, then drink five drops each. Let yourself fall asleep. When you awake, my hope – and it is not a promise – is that Shaw will no longer be able to harm you.”

\---

The shades stood, swaying faintly like wheat in a gentle wind. Charles walked between then, shivering as they parted to let him through. They seemed aware of him, but no more than plants that turned their faces to follow the sun. Every now and then he called Erik’s name again, but the sound of his own voice with no answer had become more and more disheartening. 

He had been searching for hours now. Alone on the wrong side of the river from Darwin’s kingdom, he was starting to wonder if he hadn’t already died. What was he supposed to do if he couldn’t find Erik? Go back to Darwin, apologise and ask to serve him against Shaw? Return to the living world and drink the vial alone? 

He didn’t know when he was supposed to give up. He felt tired, but he could never be so tired he couldn’t continue. Hunger gnawed at his stomach, but he knew his immortal body would never be felled by starvation or thirst. He could stay here searching forever. 

And then he glimpsed something a little way away. He pushed between two shades and ducked around a third. The shade beyond was tall, but not so tall that he towered above the others. He stood motionless, facing away from the river, staring back towards the tunnels from which the dead still streamed.

On his chest was a mottled mark that stretched from breast to breast, below his collarbones – or where his collarbones would have been if his form had been distinct enough for that. Charles reached up and traced the marks with his fingers. It felt like he was brushing against only the faintest air resistance. But the marks were unmistakeable. The long, rectangular shapes of Moira’s engagement necklace, that Erik had been wearing when the lightning struck him, burning their imprint into his skin. 

“Erik,” Charles reached up to cup the shade’s face. “It’s me. Do you see me? It’s Charles.”

The shade stood and shifted a little in the non-existent breeze. Charles took hold of its hand, but when he squeezed it, the shade’s fingers slipped out of his grasp like water and reformed into the vague shape of a hand. Charles tried again, holding on much more gently this time, and placed his hand on the shade’s back.

“Come this way,” he said. “Darwin told me the way out.”

The shade followed him when he pushed it, silent and emotionless. Charles looked away from its shapeless face, trying to blink away the moisture in his eyes. It was going to be alright. It was all going to be fine.

\---

The sunlight hurt. His eyes struggled to adjust, but even on his skin it seemed to sting. He raised his arm. His flesh looked more translucent than normal, and had a grey tinge, not just attributable to the dark robe he was now wearing. Being in the underworld all that time had done something to him, though at least he hadn’t consumed anything except the air. 

He looked back at the mouth of tiny cave from which he’d emerged. The shade stood just out of reach, unmoving as always. 

It had been a very long, very patient journey to the surface. The shade couldn’t walk without Charles hurrying it along, but when it walked it did so at its own pace, laborious and poorly-directed. If Charles pushed too hard or got impatient, his hands would simply wash through its flesh like smoke. Sometimes there were streams to cross or steep paths to ascend or ravines to clamber down and up again. What Charles could do in a few minutes took the shade an hour, sometimes two hours to complete, with constant coaxing and the herding pressure of Charles’ hands.

He had no idea how long it had taken them. Two days? A week? Longer? His body had given up demanding food. His bare feet blistered, bled and healed so many times that they now had calluses thick enough to replace sandals. And he’d never had any indication of how much further the journey would be – the surface might have been years away, or just around the corner. 

Several times he’d considered abandoning the shade. Down in the dark cave with only the glow-worms to disturb the silence he’d had nothing but his own thoughts to ponder. He’d started to wonder if it wasn’t really Erik, if the burn on its chest was a coincidence, or if he’d been lied to and it could never be restored to life. On one occasion he’d been faced by a shallow river that he knew would take hours of careful manoeuvring in the frigid water, constantly trying to keep the shade from being washed away. He was so drained and mentally fatigued he couldn’t face it, and sat on the nearest stone and simply wept, covering his face with his hands. The shade stood and watched him impassively. Another time, when it wouldn’t lift its leg enough to get over a large step in the path, he found himself simply walking away. He’d gone almost a mile up the cave before he sat down and thought of Erik sitting in the workshop shaping a bangle with careful, patient pressure, his face totally absorbed in his work.

“He came for you,” he told himself, breathing in and out through his nose. “Now go back and get him.”

He’d been half-terrified, half-hoping that the shade would no longer be where he’d left it. But no, it was standing in the exact same spot, shoulders stooped, looking up the tunnel in the direction Charles had gone. It took only a couple of minutes, lifting its leg from a different angle, to convince it over the step.

And then, very slowly, the glow-worms had shrunk to mere pinpricks and Charles had begun to spot spiders and wetas creeping back from his footsteps as he passed. The air tasted like stone and dust instead of nothingness, and eventually the scents of greenery mingled with it. When he first saw a haze of light ahead he convinced himself it was his imagination, but it grew brighter and brighter. When they finally came around the corner the sun so bedazzled him he had to stand back for several minutes before he dared approach it.

Now he spread his arms and turned his face up to bathe in the light. The singing of crickets and cicadas was raucously loud, and the trees hung branches around them and mostly obscured the cave entrance. Charles simply stood and bathed in it for several minutes and then went back to the shade.

“Come with me,” he said, his voice only a whisper after days without water or anyone else to converse with. “Come on, come into the light.”

He took the shade’s hand and tugged it gently. It took a hesitant step forward. As Charles lifted it to pull it closer, the grey, smooth hand in his entered the sunlight.

And it was human. Charles simply stared at it for a long time, wrinkled pink knuckles and a scatter of hair and numerous burns from metal-working. He gripped it tight, and it didn’t slip away, but held firm in his palm, rough and warm. He moved back, towing the shade with him, able to pull with all his strength now. It stepped quickly and easily into the sunlight. And it was Erik.

Naked, thinner than ever, his eyes closed, the burn on his chest half-healed but much more obvious. And then Erik’s nostrils flared and he breathed for the first time in – who knew how long? – and his eyes opened. He blinked at Charles.

Charles felt himself smile, and then grin wider than he thought he had ever grinned in his life.

He pulled Erik along with him, the grass tall and tickling around their thighs, the ground rough and uneven under their stumbling gaits. They crossed a small stream – Charles paused to drink, and after a moment Erik followed as if he hadn’t known how until Charles had shown him. The trees thinned and they soon emerged into the promised graveyard – the mounds rising as far as the eye could see, the square tombs and carved sculptures watching majestically over the landscape. 

Charles led them a winding path among the graves until they found one freshly dug, not yet filled with gifts or an urn. He couldn’t bear to take Erik back down into the darkness yet – he was a little afraid that he would turn back into a shadow – so he sat down on the grass of the mound. Erik settled beside him, staring at him. At last, the first self-initiated thing he’d done, he reached up and ran his thumb across Charles’ cheek.

“You look so real,” he said.

“I am real,” Charles replied. 

“I’m not…” Erik looked around, squinting up at the sun, “this isn’t the Elysium Isles?”

“Why would you be in the Elysium Isles? You need divine blood to get there,” Charles pointed out.

“Yes,” Erik agreed, as if he’d never really cared either way. “So are we on the Mount, then? Did he… did Shaw let me live?”

Charles lay down on his side, pulling Erik with him so that they were face to face, his hand resting on Erik’s neck to remind himself that there was still the pulse of blood in there. He couldn’t keep his eyes off Erik. His face was worn and flecked with flaws despite his youth. His beard was growing out with no careful trimming and preening. His body was lean, his muscles unimpressive, the hair on his chest and legs scattered thick and with no care towards aesthetics. He was so impossibly different from Shaw’s, even when Shaw had stolen Erik’s form. 

“Yes,” Charles said. “He gave me back to you and sent us away.”

“Oh,” Erik smiled, his guillotine-smile that wasn’t really that frightening when you were used to it. “He’s not so bad as the stories say, then.”

Charles couldn’t begin to tell Erik all that had happened. All those months as a pampered captive, all the times he’d seduced Shaw himself just to keep control of the situation. He’d let himself become a pet, he’d _enjoyed_ being a pet, because if he’d didn’t he would have gone mad or tried to kill himself. And burning the ambrosia, out of rage and hate that he hadn’t imagined he could feel – let alone act upon – and Logan’s face when he told Charles to go, and Shaw’s fist inside him, touching his spine, and the cold emptiness of the underworld, and the long journey back, and deserting Erik’s shade at least once, and giving up more than once… no. Erik didn’t need to know. Charles wished he could un-know it all, there was so much shame and despair hanging inside him. This moment of happiness was thin as the skin of a soap bubble. 

The vial was cold against his skin. The crystal didn’t seem to absorb his body warmth even in the blazing sunlight. 

“There’s something we have to do,” said Charles.

\---

They curled up in the deepest, darkest corner of the tomb, legs tangled together and Charles’ head on Erik’s shoulder and Erik wriggling incessantly in an attempt to find a comfortable position on the cold stone floor, which was hard when you didn’t have any clothes on. Charles tipped five drops of Darwin’s gift into Erik’s palm and watched him lick it up, fascinated by every movement. The pink of Erik’s tongue, the wrinkle that formed on the bridge of his nose as the nectar hit the back of his throat.

“It tastes of musk,” he rumbled. 

And then, like a candle flicking out, his head rolled back against the wall of the tomb and he fell asleep. 

“Erik?” Charles shook his shoulder, “Erik!”

He forced himself to control his breathing. This was _supposed_ to happen, Darwin had said it would. But suppose the god had been wrong? Or it had been a trick? Suppose the nectar was poison? 

Then Charles would be poisoned too. He tried not to hurry as he put five drops into his own palm and pressed his mouth to it. There was the faintest hint of ambrosia, but more overpowering tangs of Persian perfumes and imported herbs, of physician’s tonics and the dust in long-empty rooms. Charles leaned his head onto Erik’s shoulder. The first time he’d drunk ambrosia, it had changed him, reforged him in new alloys – when they awoke this time they would be invisible, or perhaps their shapes would have changed, perhaps they would have been turned into animals or satyrs. He didn’t know. It didn’t matter, because this time they’d both drunk together. 

Unconsciousness hit him like a flash flood on a moonless night. 

\---

Erik awoke first. He blinked against the sunlight, tipping his head back to look up at a gaping hole in the roof of the tomb – it hadn’t been there when they’d fallen asleep, but by the sun’s position only a couple of hours had passed. Dirt and stones had collapsed around them, missing them by less than a foot, and green creepers had fallen inwards to hang in veils over the edges of the hole. There was dust settled thick on Erik’s face, but when he raised his hand to brush it away he found his arm strangely heavy. The vines had fallen across his right side, and even wrapped tendrils around his wrist and fingers. He pried them off and wiped the dirt from his face. His muscles were languished and stiff.

The light was too bright to see the state of the tomb, but it looked like it had been closed since they’d fallen asleep. Erik wondered how lucky it was that no one had seen them, but perhaps that was part of the nectar’s magic. He turned his head to reassure himself that Charles was still there, but he was sleeping curled against Erik’s side, one leg thrown over Erik’s knees and his breast rising and falling in very slow, even breaths. Dust covered his whole body in a thick sheet. Erik leaned in and blew it away from Charles’ face, then shifted to clear it from the rest of his exposed skin, as if revealing a long-lost treasure. 

He felt his throat twist a little as he surveyed Charles in the pool of sunlight from above. His dream of the too-perfect doppelganger had not been a dream at all. Charles was flawless. Every inch of him looked as if it had been sculpted, arranged and painted by a team of the most esteemed artists. It made Erik afraid to touch him, as if he might be burned by such a paragon of humanity. They’d changed him, the fucking bastards, they’d done something to him that might never be undone – and beauty was one thing, but what about his mind? What had the ambrosia done to the disreputable, brazen youth that Erik had watched march away all those years ago? Was his intelligence heightened, his wit sharpened, his wisdom grown, his vanities tempered? How could Erik keep up with that? How could he ever compare, when Charles had been beloved of _gods_? 

He leaned over and kissed Charles’ closed eyes, licking a little salty sleep from the corner of the lids. He mouthed his way across to Charles’ ear, lipping along the curve and then down the line of Charles’ jaw until he reached his lips. As he hung there, brushing against Charles’ mouth, he felt his companion stir. A firm hand gripped the back of Erik’s head and pressed him in close, and Charles’ lips opened to him. The inside of his mouth was dry and still tasted of the nectar’s residue, but between them the parched skin quickly gave way to wetness and heat.

After some time, Charles drew back and looked up to examine the collapsed roof as Erik had. 

“We should go out that way,” he suggested, one hand still buried in Erik’s hair.

“Now?” Erik asked. 

Charles smiled up at him. “In a bit.”

He pulled Erik down again by his ears, and this time Erik felt fully awake, and aware that he was naked and leaning over the most divine man he’d ever touched. He heaved himself up and swung his legs over Charles’ waist, letting his instincts take control, devouring Charles’ mouth as his companion tried to find a flat place on the floor of the tomb. When he shuffled back into a softer bit of dirt, Erik impatiently grabbed the nearest wrist with one hand and a fistful of the thick robes around Charles’ thighs, rucking them up to Charles’ hips and rocking forward to bring them into contact. 

Quite suddenly, Charles’ hips bucked and his head turned away from Erik’s kiss. One hand slammed up and shoved into Erik’s chest, with such force that it almost drove the breath out of Erik’s lungs. He lunged away as Charles made a noise like a hound backing away from a lion.

“Woah,” Erik shifted back, and then darted in again, hands on either side of Charles’ head. “Charles—”

“I’m sorry,” Charles cut him off, reaching up to grab his face, trying to pull him back down again. “I’m sorry, ignore that, I’m fine—”

Erik refused to be drawn down to him. “You hit me!”

“I’m sorry, are you hurt? I’m probably stronger than I used to be.”

“You’ve always been stronger then me,” Erik frowned. “I mean _why_ did you hit me?”

Charles didn’t answer, pushing up on his elbows to try and kiss Erik again. Erik dodged him, holding his gaze. “Charles!”

In a rush, almost like it was one word, Charles said, “I thought for a moment you were him, that’s all, I’m fine now.”

Erik stared at him. “I’m not,” he said, trying not to laugh, and then the look on Charles’ face was possibly the least funny thing he’d ever seen in his life. “So Shaw wasn’t so sweet after all?”

“It’s… it’s my fault as much as anything,” Charles mumbled, looking around at the cold walls of the tomb. “I embraced it. I let myself become a slave. I threw away all my dignity just to make things easier. I loved him—”

“Don’t say that,” Erik huffed. “Love by force or coercion isn’t love, Charles.”

Charles still refused to meet his eye.

“Look at me,” Erik said, and when Charles did, he spoke steadily, “I was a slave. My mother was a slave. Our master bedded her every night, and still she smiled and kissed him when he asked and teased him like she wanted him. I thought for a long time that she was betraying my father, but she wasn’t,” Erik bit down hard on the end of his words. “She was adapting. She was holding onto her humanity. She was protecting me. Do you think it was worth throwing all that away to – to what? To maintain some empty principles?”

Charles looked away. “Maybe not.”

Erik choked and managed to say, “We don’t have to—”

“No!” Charles grabbed him by the back of the neck, hand forceful and too-strong, his eyes too blue to be human, as blue as the finest jewels that Erik had ever set into gold. “He’s never taking you away from me again.”

He bit down on Erik’s lip, on the brink of breaking the skin, and tilted his head to drive in deeper. Erik gave in to him, despite the flicker of fear deep in his belly, the thought _I don’t know what he is_ , but what did it matter? Charles was taking hold of his shoulders and rolling him onto his back, and trailing a path of kisses down his stomach and into the hair of groin and finally, when Erik was gasping and begging him for it, Charles licked a stripe down his cock. He spat on his own hand, slicking himself up and opening Erik with his fingers, hooking his arm around the back of Erik’s knee and driving into him. 

A thought flashed through Erik’s mind, _I haven’t done this in years, this shouldn’t be this easy,_ but it was. Charles was making it easy somehow. As the heat built up Erik cared less and less that it was easy and only that it was happening. One of Charles’ hands was palming Erik’s cock in time to his own thrusts, his hips snapping into Erik faster and faster. And Erik became gradually aware that, like an echo, like the amplifying shape of an amphitheatre, he could feel more than just his own orgasm racing closer. He didn’t know how he knew, but he could feel another’s body – no, he could feel his own body from Charles’ perspective, the tight friction and the glowing nerve endings in Charles’ cock. He could feel a loop of twin ecstasy exchanged back and forth, rising up and up together like two phoenixes, and then bursting – on and on – and like he could feel his limbs and his lungs and Charles’ hands from both outwards and inwards, he found he could feel the tomb around them, the bronze cups and a row of iron daggers and the chest of exquisitely shaped jewellery below the urn – and all of it hummed with his consciousness and Charles’ entwined pleasure – and _ah_ \- 

Charles slumped over him, both of them having come in sync, Erik’s seed smeared across the chest of Charles’ robe that was now being smeared on Erik. They lay panting for some time, his throat dry and his awareness drifting in and out of the moment. 

Alright, so, fucking an immortal was… different. Not bad. Erik buried his hand in Charles’ hair, kissing the top of his head, and tried not to think about it. 

“Do you hear that?” Charles whispered.

“What?”

Charles pushed himself up groggily, his cheeks flushed into symmetrical roses where Erik’s was no doubt blotchy and unevenly red. He gave a husky laugh, “Someone’s coming.”

Erik raised his head and heard voices echoing down through the hole in the ceiling. They sounded perfunctory and business-like, probably workers rather than mourners come to pay respect to the graves. “Shit,” he hissed, trying to get up and falling down again at once, his legs completely unresponsive. He massaged the blood back into them and tried to brush the dirt off his back and buttocks. “Shit, they can’t catch us, we had sex in some poor fellow’s tomb!”

Charles laughed, louder this time, and used a corner of his robe to wipe Erik down. “I’m sure it brightened his afterlife,” he winked, and yes, there was the disreputable and brazen Charles that had enthralled Erik’s attention in a jeweller’s workshop so long ago. 

Charles went and stood under the collapsed ceiling and hollered. Erik hung back a little, reluctant to stand naked in front of strangers until he knew who they were. Voices replied to Charles, but Erik couldn’t understand what they were saying. A moment later a knotted rope dropped down through the hole and Charles climbed up.

They emerged into a gloriously cloudless day. Charles seized Erik’s arm and pulled him up as if he weighed almost nothing, setting him onto his feet. One of the strangers laughed at his nudity, but Erik wasn’t looking at them. He shaded his eyes and glanced around. He’d been groggy and confused before they’d gone into the tomb, but he was sure he remembered stone shrines and sculptures filling the graveyard. The landscape around them was a barren, tussock-covered field, the graves marked only by the occasional rounded rise of the earth, much lower than Erik remembered. 

Charles was trying to talk to one of the men who’d helped them up, but the sun-browned stranger, wrapped up in clothes that were oddly tight against his body, didn’t seem to speak their language. 

“ _Archaiológos?_ ” he asked. “ _Astynomikoí?_ ”

He sounded angry, and Erik could see Charles quickly calculating an appropriate response and shaking his head with a smile. “No, no,” he pointed at Erik and himself, “We were drinking,” he mimed sipping from a _kylix_ , “and got very drunk,” he stumbled and clutched his head, “and fell down the hole,” he pointed at the dark chasm above the tomb.

“Ah,” he man nodded in understanding and called to his companions, “tourístes.”

There was a chorus of laughter from the other workers. They seemed to have dug open one of the nearby tombs, and were bringing things out, sometimes in metal, single-wheeled carts like vegetable barrows. Erik shifted a little closer to Charles.“They’re graverobbers.”

“I see that, Erik, but keep smiling,” Charles elbowed him and went back to his mimed communication with the stranger. 

Charles ingratiated himself with the graverobbers quickly, and someone came over with spare clothes for Erik. There was a short-sleeved tunic, sown closed down the sides, which he slipped over his head. The material was soft but quite tight over even his skinny body. The other piece of clothing, Erik shook out to investigate, and this time he was the one to laugh.

“What on earth are those?” Charles asked, his hands on his hips.

“Trousers,” Erik said, putting one hand on Charles’ shoulder to balance himself while he slipped his feet into the sleeves. “I haven’t worn them since I was a boy in the village where I was born! Where do you suppose we are?”

“I haven’t figured out their language yet, though it’s similar ours. The peninsula, perhaps?”

“Maybe,” Erik said dubiously, watching the graverobbers sort through their loot. Bizarrely, they were tossing coins and gold bangles into a sack without concern, but common amphora and drinking cups were marvelled over and packed into wooden boxes of sawdust with great care. 

Charles had another confusing gesture-dominated conversation with the man who seemed to be in charge of the graverobbers, asking him where they could find the nearest town. The man brought out a round compass made of a strange, shiny black material and pointed North-East, mimed walking, and then pointed North. He offered the compass to Charles.

“No, I can figure it out,” Charles pointed up at the sun. “We won’t get lost.”

The man shrugged and tucked his compass in his pocket again. They did their best to thank the graverobbers – Erik a little reluctantly – and then started walking. 

Soon the empty terrain gave way to sheep paddocks, and some time after that they reached a road that stretched very straight in each direction. It was made out of some kind of crushed, black gravel; Erik bent to touch the surface of it. “It’s like solid mortar,” he told Charles. “But none I’ve ever seen before.”

“I suppose this is what our friend the graverobber was pointing towards,” Charles shaded his eyes as he looked up and down the road. “North from here, then.”

They had been walking for only a few minutes when they heard a growl that made Erik flinch. He spun around, searching for the source. Something was approaching at great speed from the south. He heard Charles draw his sword, but before they could even figure out what to do the creature had shot past them, a faceless black head turning to look at them as it passed.

“It was balancing on two wheels,” Erik said, his heart racing in his chest. “A monster with _wheels_.”

“We’d best stay on guard,” Charles said. “Stay behind me if another one approaches.”

“That’s my sword you’re holding,” Erik pointed out.

Charles rolled his eyes. “I can recover from injuries better than you can.”

If Erik had any hope that this strange country had few surprises left, he was exceptionally mistaken. Very soon after that, another rumbling creature – larger than the first – approached them, heading in the direction they were travelling. They stood to the side to let it pass, but it began to slow down and turn towards them. Charles stepped in front of Erik, gripping the sword but not yet drawing it.

But this time Erik had recognized the creature for what it was – not a monster, but a vehicle of some kind, like a covered chariot. A man stuck his head out the window and said something in the same language as the graverobbers. 

Charles gestured to himself and Erik and used the new word, “tourístes,” and then waved his arms to indicate confusion. “We don’t know where we are.”

The man beckoned them with his arm and leaned back inwards, opening a door on the side of the vehicle. Charles relaxed his grip on the sword and looked at Erik, who nodded to show his assent. They climbed into the vehicle, Charles sitting in a small, central seat and Erik on the end. 

The man was elderly, with an impressive moustache but strangely no beard. He pointed at Charles and laughed, asking a question and picking at his own shirt to indicate he was talking about Charles’ clothes. 

“Uh, yes,” Charles laughed, clearly with no idea what he was agreeing to. He pointed at his mouth and flapped one hand to indicate speaking, then shook his head and made a cutting motion with his hand.

“Galliká – uh, Française?” the man asked, twisting something beside the round wheel in front of him. The vehicle began to vibrate and grumble and moved completely of its own accord back onto the right half of the road. “Angliká?” he guessed. “Germaniká?”

Charles shook his head to all of them. As they travelled he chattered happily to the old man and the old man talked back, both of them laughing every now and then because of the absurdity of the completely incomprehensible conversation. Erik stayed silent, clinging to a handle on the inside of the door. The vehicle was moving almost as fast as Hank’s flying machine, and was much warmer and shakier. His skin was clammy and claustrophobic inside of the strange clothes. He felt ill and his head was beginning to ache by the time they reached an enormous town. 

\---

The buildings were like nothing Erik had ever seen. So much glass, and so _tall!_ How did they stay upright? Most of the ground was made of the same black mortar, or a pale cement like the stuff the Macedonians used. Huge flocks of the self-moving vehicles rattled up and down the streets, in every shape and form, including many of the two-wheeled types they had first encountered; Erik realised the faceless heads were actually people wearing helmets of some sort. Everyone was in strange clothes, and the words displayed in windows and on banners and signs were all unfamiliar, though the alphabet was the one he knew. He grabbed at Charles once and pointed at a huge mural of a woman holding a bottle of something, painted on cloth and stretched on the side of a building, “Look, look! It’s so real!”

“Amazing,” Charles grinned, but they soon found that such realistic images were everywhere. 

Their driver dropped them in the middle of the town, and Charles bade him farewell and good luck. They wandered for a long while, Erik’s feet growing uncomfortably hot on the searing black road. And then they rounded a corner into a large, open square and came across the strangest sight.

It was a huge black machine, resting on wheels – it was another vehicle like the others they’d seen, but so much larger, and a very different shape. It had a long, tapered nose and outstretched protrusions on either side like wings. It must have been an unusual sight even in this country, because there was a large crowd gathered around it. In the centre, a small group of people stood separate from the onlookers. As Erik stood gaping up at the machine, Charles tugged his elbow.

“I think they’re looking for us,” he said, a line growing on his brow.

“How do you know?”

“I… I’m not sure, I just know,” Charles gripped his hand and tugged him towards the group beneath the machine. There were words exchanged and the crowd parted to let them through. 

There were a strange, mismatched group – though after nymphs, centaurs and gods, Erik found them one of the least strange things he’d seen recently. Most prominent was a tall, hulking creature with a feline face and thick blue fur, who was nevertheless wearing clothes like all the rest. There was a dark-skinned woman with white hair too, and a man with a metal and glass shield over his eyes, and another sitting in a chair that had large wheels attached on the sides. Two fingers of his hand were pressed to his temple, but he lowered them as they approached.

Something about the stances of the others told Erik that this man was the leader of the group. There was an aura of authority about him, and apart from his bald head, he looked strikingly familiar to Erik. He wheeled his chair forward a little and nodded to Charles, and then to Erik, and said something indecipherable.

The blue creature – well, blue man, it seemed – stepped forward. “Hello,” he said, finally in Erik and Charles’ language, though his accent was from nowhere that Erik recognised. “Can you understand myself?”

“Yes,” Charles said brightly. “Good work, but it’s ‘me’, not ‘myself’.”

The blue man grimaced, and lifted a thin metal tablet in his paw, touching it delicately with the tip of one claw. He cleared his throat. “Do you know where you are?”

The man in the chair reached out and touched the blue man with the back of his hand, saying something he evidently wanted translated. The blue man nodded and said to Charles. “This is Teacher Xavier. He said you will be starting to understand, but your friend not yet.”

Charles nodded, and glanced up at Erik. Erik frowned. “What does he mean?”

Charles tightened his fingers around Erik’s hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you what the nectar would do. I only knew it would keep us safe from Shaw somehow—” ( _keep us safe from Shaw?_ Erik thought frantically), “but that we’d have to give up all we knew. Everything, even our language. I think… I think we’ve been asleep for a very long time, Erik. And the world has changed,” he turned back to the blue man. “Do you have history records? I want to know what happened to a woman named Moira.”

“History, history,” the blue man muttered, scrawling on his tablet. He couldn’t seem to find what he wanted, so he tapped a couple of times and handed the tablet to Charles. 

The surface on top seemed to be glass, and by some magic displayed images and writing that changed when Charles touched it. He laughed, almost dropping the tablet (the blue man gasped and gritted his teeth). There were letters in their alphabet arrayed along the bottom, and when Charles touched them, writing appeared in a white gap further up. In the same poor translation as the blue man’s words came the message, NO FOR RESULTS OF ‘MOIRA’. The same appeared for ‘DAUGHTER OF MACTAGGERT’. 

“Try spelling it formally, _Myrrina_ ,” Erik said. Charles tried that, and this time up came a slew of words, appearing on the glass before their eyes. Charles interpreted it from the broken translation. 

“Myrrina, niece of the commander Nicanor the Victorious. After her father’s death, she became a famed naval tactician sailing with the fleet in the Peninsula wars, usually accompanied by her husband, a captain named Straton – that’s the formal name for Sean,” Charles glanced at Erik. “There was a lieutenant in my fleet named Sean.”

“She married again?” Erik growled. “We swore on Angel’s shrine that we wouldn’t take another partner until I brought you home!”

“Erik, is that really your biggest concern here?” Charles jabbed him with his elbow. “You understand, don’t you? They’re… they’re all gone. Everyone we knew. And the gods, too,” he looked back at the blue man, pointing at the numbers beside Moira’s name. “These dates, what do they mean? How long ago was this?”

“Two and one half thousand,” the blue man said, and then amended. “Years.”

Erik was watching Charles, who appeared to have stopped breathing. He put his arm around his companion. “Why did we need to stay safe from Shaw? You told me he let you go willingly. And how can we be safe now? Shaw is immortal.”

Charles chewed on his lower lip, running his hand through his hair. “There’s… there’s a lot of things we need to talk about,” he handed the tablet back to the blue man. “How did you know we would be here? How did you know who… what we are?”

The man in the chair said something, and the blue man translated, “Teacher Xavier has the ability to sense people who are different. He knew that two _mutants_ ,” Erik frowned at the strange word, but let it pass, “from very long ago were waking up, though we still don’t understand how you have been sleeping all this time. We came to find you. To take you back to the Teacher’s home – it can be your home now, if you want this.”

Erik and Charles glanced at each other. Erik mumbled, “Raven and Hank and Alex. You really think they’re all dead?”

Charles nodded, and took a breath. “We’ll come for now,” he said firmly to the blue man. “Until we know more about this new world,” he took Erik’s hand once more. “And our place in it.”

\---

_“This is going to be a nightmare,” Hank complained, strapping himself into the pilot seat of the blackbird. He looked back at the professor, sitting in as co-pilot. “You’re sure they’re mutants?”_

_“Absolutely,” Xavier nodded. “Though I don’t think either of them are aware of their abilities yet, or exactly how powerful they’ll be. We’ve come at a good time to protect them, and those around them, as they manifest.”_

_Storm glanced towards the back of the jet, where Cyclops was awkwardly trying to convince their two newcomers to put on their seatbelts. “Well?” she said dryly. “Are you going to tell us the big secret?”_

_“What big secret?” Xavier asked innocently._

_“Why the one in the robe looks so remarkably like a young version of you,” Storm raised her eyebrows. “Why he’s saying his name is Charles. It’s not exactly typical Greek, is it?”_

_Xavier pressed his lips together, but shrugged good-naturedly. “If I understood it myself, I would tell you, my dear. A counterpart from the distant past, perhaps… or more likely some kind of alternate reality, or something even less understood by our current science. I’ll have Hank look into it.”_

_“I’m not promising I’ll figure it out,” Hank warned. “But hopefully they’re fast learners – maybe once they can speak at least one language that isn’t dead, they can tell us themselves.”_

\---

Erik had decided he hated the future. Or at least, travelling in the future. Charles had bounced and grinned all the way through take-off, held in place only by the cloth straps the man with the eye-shield had _insisted_ they wear (Erik had nearly taken a swing at him when he’d reached between Charles’ legs to click the metal buckles together). Erik had merely closed his eyes and focused on not throwing up. He couldn’t see how he’d have anything to throw up anyway; he hadn’t had anything to eat in… oh, about two and a half thousand years. 

Now they seemed to have settled into a level, steady flight. Charles wanted to look out the window, but Erik reached over and grabbed his hand so tight Charles winced.

“Do _not_ leave me sitting here on my own. I am going to _die_ ,” Erik said through gritted teeth.

“You flew all the way to the Mount!” Charles laughed. 

“That was different. I was in control,” Erik’s His stomach heaved. “Azazel, God of Travellers, spare me.” 

“Careful. You might bring him back.”

Erik glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

Charles didn’t answer. He was suddenly interested in looking everywhere except at Erik. His free hand – the one Erik wasn’t gripping like a drowning man – played idly with the pommel of his sword.

“Can I have that back?” Erik asked. 

“The sword?” Charles frowned, but passed it over, sheath and all.

Erik slid it out and held the blade up to the light. “There’s writing on here,” he said. “I spotted it when you drew it before. It wasn’t there when I went to the Mount. It says… ‘From the great survivor to a younger one, remember my gifts’,” he raised his head to look at Charles. The cool air circulating inside the flying machine seemed to have suddenly racked up to the heat of a summer’s day, and the safety straps were far too tight. “’The Great Survivor’ is the cult name for Darwin.”

Charles held his gaze, his smile flickering small at the corners of his mouth. He waited for Erik to speak. 

Erik looked away. He put the sword down on his lap, feeling at his chest for his own heartbeat. It thrummed in his chest, sprinting with the flying machine and of what he’d just discovered. But it was definitely beating.

“When we were asleep,” he said quietly, “I dreamed we were in a cave, and you were leading me towards the light. That was real, then? And you… you’re so much more than me now. You’ve defied the gods. You practically are one yourself.”

Charles took hold of Erik’s hand in both of his own. “This is real,” he said. The expression on his face was reverent, a look Erik had never seen outside of temples. “Whatever I did, whether I’m still immortal or if that part of me fades, and however the world has changed, what matters is you brought me home. You _are_ my home.”

Erik nodded. Things could never be as they were, he understood that, but knowing that wouldn’t make it easier. Having Charles look at him like that every day, though? Would at least make it possible.


End file.
